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Scripting Gurus Debate Dynamic Languages
5/16/2008
Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and Sun Microsystems' director of Web technologies, hosted a lively post-Script Bowl panel discussion on the future of dynamic scripting languages at this year's JavaOne Conference.
"Until a few years ago, the entire world was either Java or .NET," Bray observed. "And now all of a sudden, we have an explosion of new languages. We are at a very exciting inflection point where any new language with a good design basis has a chance of becoming a major player in the software development scene."
Angsuman Chakraborty, CEO of Taragana, a software development outsourcing company based in West Bengal, India, asked the panel what turned out to be a central question of the discussion: Why, in the midst of this explosion, when we already have such popular dynamic scripters as Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP, did the world need Sun's new scripting language, JavaFX Script?
"It's just one more thing to learn," Chakraborty said, "and with all these very similar languages, it becomes harder and harder for the developer to master each one."
Bray's answer, in a nutshell, was that no single language is going to solve everyone's needs. Also, JavaFX was aimed at content authors building rich user interfaces and using Flash, rather than traditional developers.
"The thought that there has to be one language for anything doesn't make a whole lot of sense," said panelist Tor Norbye, a principal engineer at Sun who works on the Ruby and JavaScript editors in the NetBeans IDE. "That's been the standard on the Java platform, but it's not the way people do development off the platform and in a lot of other application domains. JavaFX Script provides another way to do this, a way that's custom tailored to particular application domain, but not to the exclusion of other languages. It's the diversity of languages on the platform that we're trying to emphasize."
Ted Leung, principal engineer in the Dynamic Languages and Tools group at Sun, pointed out that this scripter explosion didn't actually involve many new languages. "A lot of these languages have existed for 10 years-plus," he said. "Before Java there was a profusion of what we now call dynamic languages that were about to come into the marketplace. Then Java happened and you had this sort of nuclear winter effect over all those languages. Now people are building software using these other technologies."
"For too long, we've tried to put developers into one box," added Greg Murray, Sun's AJAX architect and creator and principal architect of Project jMaki. "We've said if you're going to do this type of application with this platform and this language, you're going to do this other type of application with another type of language. But developers are individuals, and developer organizations have their own skill sets. These different languages provide multiple ways to approach problems."
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