The next challenge for dynamic languages
Internet access is back....way!! T-minus 13 days.....
John has a link to a article written by David Ascher, CTO of ActiveState. In the article he discuss's the challenges facing dynamic languages and ponders their future. Its a very interesting article and given ActiveStates history with such langauges (Perl, Python and PHP) what David has to say you just have to listen to. Like all language groups, it faces a challenge but I do believe that a runtime can unite the language groups. David does iterate the challenge that dynamic languages don't run well on runtimes as well as languages designed to run on them. David does mention the CLR and JVM as his examples, but we can reverse that with Parrot, as a runtime it will run dynamic languages at the same speed (or better) as native platform versions but not so well languages such as C# or Java. While work such as IronPython & Jython has shown that a dynamic language can run at native platform speed son runtimes such as as the CLR and JVM there is still much work to do. The challenge IMHO facing all languages in the next few years is to find ground to unite on, to give developers much more flexible choices, yes I can prototype in Perl/Python, yes I can then write my full blown app in C# or Java (and I can do safe knowing that the type system and internals are the same, my app will run internally the same).