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Scripting Gurus Debate Dynamic Languages
5/16/2008
To a question from the audience about why anyone would port dynamic language runtimes to the JVM, Charles Nutter, co-lead developer on the JRuby project and now full-time JRuby exec at Sun, said, "You've probably noticed that Python developers are rarely heavy Ruby developers, and Ruby developers are rarely heavy Groovy developers. It's not that any one of those platforms differs significantly from the others as far as capabilities. It's just that certain types of developers and certain types of problems are going to be well-suited to particular languages and platforms. Now, we're finally starting to recognize that, on the JVM, we can provide an excellent base for all of those languages and frameworks to run on."
Another attendee asked what's missing from the Java programming language that would make all of these dynamic languages so popular.
"One of the nice characteristics of Ruby, Groovy and Python is that they have a malleable syntax," said Guillaume Laforge, Groovy project lead and initiator of the Grails project, "and all those dynamic features bring new innovative ways of expressing your code in a more readable way. That's probably one of the key aspects of these languages that makes them sometimes more interesting to use for a given domain than a generally purpose language like Java. And it brings productivity to the process."
"Another reason that people chose dynamic languages over Java is less code," Bray added. "Dynamic languages frequently allow you to address the same problem in a third the number of lines of code. And code is nasty stuff. It's expensive to create, and bloody expensive to maintain, and the less of it you have the better."
To a question about why there are no implementations of these dynamic languages for the .NET CLR, Leung observed that Microsoft has, until recently, been language-focused.
"If you look at what Microsoft is doing in this space, you can see that." he said. "But we know from the success of the Java platform that it's more than just the language that matters. It's the surrounding libraries, the frameworks, and all that."
"The CLR kind of grew up on the static language side of the world, from the C++ folks," Nutter said. "Whereas Java grew up on the Smalltalk side of the world. It was actually grown out of a Smalltalk VM. So what we have on the JVM, oddly enough, is a dynamic language runtime under the covers powering a statically typed language. The work that we are doing in future versions of the JVM and the work that we're doing with JRuby and the current set of dynamic languages is essentially exposing that capability to run dynamic languages extremely well to all of the different language implementations."
Bray added that he didn't see great differences between the two. "I think it's a business issue," he said. "I think .NET is good technology, well-designed and well-implemented. That's a controversial statement to make around here. But what's not so controversial is that .NET comes from a troubling set of lock-ins and tie-ins. And that's the problem with .NET."
Chakraborty came away from the panel unsatisfied with the panel's answer. "Sun is focused more on getting all the languages under the hood so that they can get more of the developer base," he said. "But practically speaking, this amounts to unnecessary and even confusing diversity for the developer."
John K. Waters is a freelance journalist and author based in Palo Alto, CA.
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