Re: Da Vinci Machine Project

[Ben <thebassplayer@...>]

Funny enough, Wikipedia had much more immediate and useful information
on JavaFX than the Sun website.  I went through several clicks without
finding anything on how the language actually looked or worked.

Anyway, a scripting language for the JVM seems like the hot topic now.
 I've heard of JRuby, Jython seems to be dead or dying, and there's
Sun's JavaFX, which I've just heard of, and then various dialects of
ECMA Script.  (In my opinion, the eventual winner of the JVM Script
Wars will be an ECMA Script dialect.  I'm presently rooting for Rhino
[1], a project by Mozilla.  From what I've seen, it's a very nicely
featured JavaScript with a couple cool and useful additions, like more
class-oriented OO and Python-derived syntax sugar, like list
comprehensions.)

And then comes this Da Vinci Machine.  It sounds like absolutely great
news for every dynamic language and for every person who loves hacking
them, but it's just news right now.  And from looking at Kahlua, and
responding to Javier's comment, coroutines (and closures?) still look
like they're going to be a pain.

I'm convinced more and more by the assertion that ANSI 89 C is truly
the most portable language out there.  It's small, fast, and for it's
age has shown an incredible amount of flexibility (Lua's source code
opened my eyes to using functional programming concepts in a
structural language!).  Most of the time you are just wanting for
automatic memory management and more fleshed out libraries.

Which brings us back to Java.  Going to prove a bigger point:  it's
just depends on what you want and need.  And that the Da Vinci
Machine, if it lives up to it's hype, will certainly be a _good_
thing.  The *best*, however, remains to be seen.

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/

On Feb 11, 2008 12:35 AM, Dirk Feytons <dirk.feytons@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sun has been working on an embedded scripting language for Java called
> JavaFX. See http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp
> It's built around content generation and data binding; you can see it
> a bit as their answer to Microsoft's Silverlight.
>
> --
> Dirk
>