I find it suspicious that Java or Scala didn't make the list. Java may not be sexy but it checks many boxes... And I suspect that Scala would have been a serious contender in brevity too.
The JVM isn't easy to beat for software that's more complicated than "Hello World". Sure you can beat it, but you're going to have to work very, very hard.
The security flaws exist in the area few people care about (and shouldn't even really be installed any more) -- the sandboxing and web start code.
Did you include gcc and friends in your "too big" calculations? Hard to program without them.
That said it does not do well for desktop apps due to slow startup, high memory use and lack of native toolkit. It does much better as a server side runtime.
If you're calling something thousands of times, fast process startup times are good. This isn't the model windows uses though which is the primary target of c#.
I certainly notice any time I boot something up that requires the JVM, I refuse to use the CLR, so I can't tell you much about my own experience with that.
As for page load times, this is silly. There is no startup time on a page at all. Possibly the first hit but there are warm start options for that in CLR at least which make this a complete non issue.
To give you an idea, 98% of our page hits are under 80ms processing time and we have big, heavy pages (we're old school asp.net mostly).
I'm talking about command-line applications, like the one in the article and in your first post. Then you get the startup every single time you run the command.
I use zeroinstall a lot (I'm a contributor), and I turned off tab completion because the lag (of the python implementation) made me wonder if my terminal had locked up, which was far more distracting than trying to remember the available arguments. I have re-enabled it in the ocaml port, because now it's effectively instant.
This is only the case if the code is JITed.
With ngen and mono-aot it can be compiled to native code directly.
> JVM-based languages would not fare any better.
It is all a matter of which JVM is used. Some of them offer AOT compilation and on disk cache of JITted code from previous runs, thus matching the startup time of native binaries.
Not such a big fan of Java, but Scala seems to be a strong contender for Java.Next* , and is certainly a viable dynamic-to-static transition language given its terse syntax, deliciously rich collections library, and implicits support (for the MOP fans).
* Twitter being able to withstand spikes of 140K+ tweets per second without lagtime is impressive to say the least.
Really, this article is about "I want to rewrite my program in the newest, coolest language", not about which is the best tool for the job. And that's fine, but the author should present it that way.
I'm sure you meant "newest and/or coolest", or "recently become coolest", but it's worth noting that Haskell is about as old as Python, and OCaml is not much younger.
It's the standard library and such that are moving fast still.