No Next Big Language... Dunno, I suspect we may be stuck with one.

I've just read Alex Miller's blog entry regarding the NBL (Next Big Language) or rather the fact that there will not be a NBL and that the age of multiple programming languages has arrived.

I like the idea and I'm all for it to take off...

It's just that in my experience companies, especially those who's core industry is not IT related tend to minimize risk as much as possible, and therefore try to stay as mainstream as possible.

Java after all, quickly got pushed into the mainstream by companies like IBM and Oracle throwing their weight behind it, And consequently companies adopted it - I daresay - because it presented a much lower risk than many of it's competitors at the time such as Smalltalk.

Furthermore companies seem to like to standardize on a programming language since it makes things like hiring and training and administration a lot easier.

Its also these companies which keep the bulk of the programming community employed.

Therefore as much the acceptance of multiple programming languages is growing among us programmers I see very little acceptance of it with these companies who fork out the majority of the cash to get systems built.

Consider that Microsoft talked much about multiple programming languages when it released .Net and after almost 8 years you will be hard pressed to find a lot of work being done on .Net which isn't written in C# or VB.Net.

Consequently then it's normal that one of the language will get used the most and therefore employ the most people and become the NBL.

Now having said that I think Sun-Acle may actually be in a good position to take the multi-language concept mainstream, more so than Microsoft in 2002. For one thing the JVM is still the most portable runtime around, furthermore it's battle tested and smokin' fast. It's also widely adopted, supported and well understood.

The JVM could allow a company to standardize on the infrastructure but pick the tool which will be the most productive for the development task at hand.

Of course if this idea takes of, then we our next debate will be on the NBR (Next Big Runtime).

Is Javaless Java reaching critical mass?

There is a lot of talk about how this is possibly the last JavaOne, as Oracle is about to buy Sun out.

However if you look at what everybody was at talking about at JavaOne you can't but help get the idea that JavaOne is an anachronism any way, this trend seems to involve:

- JavaFX.
- Groovy.
- Scala.
- JRuby.
- Honourable mentions for Clojure and Jython.

It's hard to miss the lack of Java here...

Ok so people are interested in other languages in the JVM, however interest doesn't necessarily translate into use.

This brings me to my question: have alternative JVM languages gone mainstream? can I go to my client who is still trying to get COBOL out of their system and confidently sell him on one of these alternative languages?