Day 2 of the JVM Language Summit

Well, how often do you get to speak to an employee of Sun, Google and Microsoft in the same day? And not just any employee, but some of their best and brightest? Needless to say, day 2 was loads of fun. And I got to ask Erik Meijer exactly how many tie-dye shirts does he own... I've always wondered that.

Overall impressions: many people here are "into" functional programming languages. Concurrency is another big topic. This conference has just the right blend of academia and "real world" for me. It is very technical, but not so full of Greek letters that your head hurts.

• Gosling keynote - History of Java.
• JavaFX - How they use javac to compile JavaFX.
• JRuby - How they have blazed the trail for dynamic languages on the JVM.
• ASM - The library for byte code manipulation.
• PHP - Not totally sure why, but they are working on it. Overall, I think its good to have as many mainstream languages on the JVM as possible.
• MOP - Metaobject protocol for passing objects between dynamic languages on the JVM. Like the idea, not sure sure about the implementation.
• invokedynamic backport - I can't get enough details about invokedynamic.
• Clojure - Functional language on the JVM. The highlight of the day for me. It's not 100% what I would like to see, but it is the closest yet.
• Python gradual typing - Typing notation makes your head spin, but a very good talk.
• Jython - Sort of opposite situation from the CLR/DLR. On the DLR IronPython came before IronRuby and Ruby.NET and really blazed the trail. On the JVM Jython has been around, but they seem to be in a complete re-write and are really leveraging a lot from JRuby (and that is very, very good).

Final observation: I'm very impressed with how approachable the 80 or so odd people here are, especially the Sun employees. Granted they are the hosts, but they have really taken their time to interact with the participants (as they should because I really don't think that they would want to alienate this crowd in particular!).