NFJS in general and JRuby in specific

Several of the NearInfinity developers went to the Reston stop of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference. Some of the conferences were especially interesting. It was thrilling to hear strong, detailed skepticism of SOA from the expert panel. The arms race with .Net to host other programming languages has gone wild!

• JHaskell.
• Sleep. Quoted from the site: Sleep is heavily inspired by Perl with bits of Objective-C thrown in
• Dynamic Java.
• Groovy seems like Java "lite." The groovy compiler reportedly accepts most Java source, but also permits a more flexible yet terse syntax. This gained a lot of traction at the conference. Some people complained that the name sounded too much like "Ruby." Which leads to...
• JRuby. The overall goal is to mate the slick Ruby syntax with the mature Java VM. I'm very hesitant to seriously consider it for a few reasons:
  1. The interpreter will variously introduce bugs and lack features. This will be an ongoing issue as Ruby is an advanced, relatively young language; 2.0 is under active development.
  2. The Ruby VM will get much better over time. When it does, the argument for using the excellent Java VM will be much weaker.
• For better or worse, I didn't see a competitor to Fortran.NET