Oh? Gosh, I must have misread it. I admit I was in a hurry, and what he said sounded so much like what other proprietary enterprise vendors say when promising vaporware that I got the exact wording confused.

UPDATE: Look, I am NOT making fun of your post in any way. I think it's fair game to poke a little at his comments given that there has been no other mention of this, no roadmap, nothing. But I respect your post and the fact that you pushed a little further and tried to find some corroboration for his statement.

I'd like to think that somewhere in Oracle-land, there's a white paper from the Sun days talking about this idea, and maybe they're even trying to make it fly right now. And good job teasing that out and asking some intelligent questions about what it may mean.

I'm hardly an Oracle (née Sun in this context) booster; i.e. as a Clojure partisan, I'm all too aware of the benign neglect that comes with using the JVM but not Java, and with vaporware (JWebPane, anyone?).

All that said, I'm happy enough to be Charlie Brown and take a run at this football. Cynicism leads to either resigning myself to using Javascript forever for client side stuff, something I just couldn't swallow psychologically.

Why do you hate JavaScript so much? You can thoroughly ignore all notions of classes and use it as a lesser scheme.

Javascript is a bad language with poor libraries, and I'm forced to use it. I've said before: if it weren't for its distribution, it simply wouldn't be used. If given other choices (emphasis on the plural there), not one developer would opt for Javascript.

"The good parts" of Javascript get a lot of play, but I don't want to have cope by using patterns and avoiding the dull, broken bits that go along for the ride...and I'm surprised that many (most?) other competent developers that wouldn't put up with such compromises in their "real" languages aren't as irritated about Javascript as I have been.

"If given other choices (emphasis on the plural there), not one developer would opt for Javascript"

How do you explain the recent widespread enthusiasm for Node.js, including from server-side engineers with little to no previous JavaScript experience?

Some percentage of developers do choose Javascript among multiple choices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Uses_outside_web_pag...

Stockholm syndrome?

"Javascript is a bad language with poor libraries, and I'm forced to use it."

The same can be said for any programming language that you don't like.

No it can't. Browser is pretty much the only platform where you have to use a certain language.

I suppose you've never had to work a day job at a "real" company before?

agreed - it was initially developed in about 10 days of caffeine, and it shows.

gorram it, jwz.

Brendan, right? http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...

He's being sarcastic. He's paraphrasing.