What happens to Clojure if something bad happens to the JVM? It's not that I think the JVM is going away any time soon. Sure, Sun looks kind of shaky right now, but there are alternative sources of JVMs. Probably the JVM can survive even if Sun doesn't.
Probably. But I had a favorite programming language once before. It was a Lisp called Ralph. Eventually the company that developed it abandoned it, and it evolved into a different language, called Dylan, that I don't like anywhere near as much. That was a bad experience, and I don't care to repeat it. It was well over a decade before Clojure came along, and until it did, there was no programming language that I liked nearly as much as Ralph. I had to make do in the interim with Common Lisp, Ocaml, and Haskell, languages that I like a lot, but not as much as I liked Ralph. So, I'm probably just being paranoid, but indulge me for a moment: what happens to Clojure if something bad happens to the JVM? If the JVM went away or turned into something ugly for some reason, how would the Clojure community respond? By going extinct? By mutating into something much less appealing, as happened with Ralph and Dylan? Or by finding some way to preserve the particular character of Clojure and its community? What is the way to preserve that particular character? Can you imagine a Clojure implementation on a different underlying runtime? Which ones might possibly be suitable? Can you imagine a Clojure on top of, say the CLR? Or on top of a Common Lisp? Or on GHC or perhaps the LLVM? Merely imagining these alternatives goes some way toward ameliorating my senile paranoia. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
