JVM - The hottest platform

When I was in college around year 2000, Java was the hottest language in town. Java had this magic, write once, run anywhere. Java code is compiled into an indermediate bytecode, which can run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Everybody around me was taking Java courses. However, when I took a course in Java, I was a little skeptical of Java. I thought of it as yet another overly hyped language. I found it too verbose to even write a simple “Hello World” program. Also, in those days, JVM was very very slow.

Well, I was naive. Over the years things have changed, and so have my views about Java language and JVM, in particular. JVM is no longer slow, the community is huge and the sheer number of libraries/resources available for JVM are enormous. There is a lot of innovation happening in JVM world as well, with langugages like Scala and Clojure leading the charge. Both are functional languages, which run on JVM and can access the existing JVM stuff with relative ease. So, all the Java libraries are available to the user in these new languages, which means they can focus on language features, instead of building a library around it.

Scala is a statically typed laguage aiming for brevity (of code) with Twitter being the most prolific user, while Clojure is more LISP-like which makes the language extremely small. Also, there are implementations of Python and Ruby which target JVM, Jython and JRuby. And, according to Wikipedia, there are a lot more.

JVM really seems to be the hotbed of innovation and it is not going away for at least a hundred years from now.