As the year winds down, the programming-language news keeps flowing;
at this point I wouldn’t be surprised by major New
Year’s Eve announcements.
Bruce Eckel wrote
The departure
of the hyper-enthusiasts, a lengthy riff on Beyond Java,
giving Bruce Tate a hard time on some issues and ranting away informatively on
Ruby & Python & Zope & EJBs & Rails & lots more; he’s
a little less enamored of Ruby than others.
Speaking of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson
responds at length.
If you’re going to read these, do not fail to read the comments,
which are even more interesting and informative; Bruce Tate turns up in
both conversations.
The other item that caught my eye was
Cameron
Purdy noting that
Caucho claims to have a module that
compiles PHP to bytecodes and runs it on the JVM
four
times faster than mod_php (first benchmark, but on a real app
not synthetic). It’s GPL’ed.
This is more than a little surprising. I’ve been campaigning heavily in the
Java community at large and here at Sun specifically to make dynamic languages
on the JVM a major priority, but I’d never really focused on PHP, because I
didn’t know anyone was even working on the problem. (Well, to be honest, also
because PHP has always made me nervous.)
This changes the “On Beyond Java” picture.
[Late addition: last word to
Steve Jenson.]
