Is there an opportunity for an open language with similar VM ease-of-use/performance tradeoffs - or is hardware now fast enough for the ease/speed of dynamic languages to fill that gap (Python, Ruby, Javascript, ...)?
Updated to add: Directly from the Mono Project website "An open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET"
Now with F# on Mono...great things!
The only thing you need from Oracle nowdays is JDK, and with OpenJDK becoming a standard - you need nothing.
Sure, it's against the concept of a public spec, and OpenJDK; and it might not work, or at worst fragment the Java standard and destroy much of its value - but I can't see how Oracle could help themselves from doing this. It's inevitable.
It's not the JDK that you need from Oracle for Java to be a standard, but rather the JCK.
This issue is a couple of years old and hasn't been solved: http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html
Unless by "standard" you mean what everybody uses.
How does that contradict what I said?
Haskell and the ml family only have ease-of-use for people who think higher order predicate calculi have ease-of-use - some of whom will vigorously argue that everyone should find them easy-to-use.
(I don't know enough scala to form a judgment, but I haven't heard it being touted as primarily having ease-of-use, in contrast to Python and Ruby.)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2987408/actors-in-scala-n...
There's only 1 guy working on it but he's been going at it furiously
http://lamp.epfl.ch/~magarcia/ScalaCompilerCornerReloaded/
(do they feel itchy about using the LAMP subdomain?
I think it has been decided that the JVM will always be the LCDenominator VM (e.g. implmentations on other VM's pretend type erasure is happening, for compatibility with JVM implementation)
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