RedMonkOne Dynamic Language Jam Session May 7

Are industry analysts less popular than estate agents? I mean, this is a pretty interesting story from an Influence 2.0/community/Participation perspective, but nobody seems to be linking to it. Sun, a RedMonk patron, is providing the infrastructure for us to run our own event, piggy-backing on the company’s CommunityOne. This is RedMonk’s first physical conference. Its completely unprecedented for Sun to completely cede editorial control at a major event to the community formerly known as the audience. Why am I excited this morning?

Well what was the big news at Microsoft Mix 07? An open source runtime for dynamic languages. What are we talking about next week in what promises to be a really interesting part of the day- an open source runtime for dynamic languages…

Here is what Charles Nutter has to say:

We’re going to have a number of Sun engineers there, including Tom Enebo and myself, John Rose from the JVM, Alex Buckley, and more. There will be representatives from JRuby (besides Tom and I), Jython, SISC, Rhino, Groovy, and others. It’s going to be our big opportunity to make sure the JVM continues on a path of solid support for dynamic (and other) languages. And lest ye forget, these discussions will directly influence Java 7…so it’s a unique opportunity we must not waste.

Why now? Because interest in dynamic languages for general-purpose application development–especially on top of mainstream virtual machines like the JVM–has simply exploded in the past year. At JavaOne, there’s an entire track devoted to Tools and Languages, where the party line in the past has always been “Java Java Java”. There are more language-related talks than anyone could attend, where before they were few and far between. And perhaps most importantly, Microsoft today showed they’re doing the exact same thing we want to do, announcing their CLR-based Dynamic Language Runtime.

But we have a different palette with which to paint. The JVM is truly open source. All the language implementations are truly open source. We have vast communities in the Java world and strong, energetic communities around each dynamic language project. And all those communities have deep roots in the open source world. Our world is tailor-made for collaboration, and now is the time.

So, on Monday, May 7th (good lord, less than a week away!) I invite language implementers and alternative JVM language enthusiasts to join us.”

Like Charles says – we look forward to seeing you there. Note we’ll also get a chance to see performance god Bryan Cantrill demonstrating how to use DTrace with Ruby On Rails apps.

Ruby
Java
JVM