Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

Although Python is pretty close, if you exclude Windows (and don't we all want to do that?).

I don’t know if it is a me problem or if I’m missing the right incantations to set up the environment or whatever. Never had that much problems with Java.

But I’m a Java and Ruby person so it might really be missing knowledge.

This takes nothing away from Java and the Java ecosystem though. The JVM allows around the same number of target systems to run not one language but dozens. There’s JRuby, Jython, Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, jgo, multiple COBOL compilers that target JVM, Armed Bear Common Lisp, Eta, Sulong, Oxygene (Object Pascal IIRC), Rakudo (the main compiler for Perl’s sister language Raku) can target JVM, JPHP, Renjin (R), multiple implementations of Scheme, Yeti, Open Source Simula, Redline (Smalltalk), Ballerina, Fantom, Haxe (which targets multiple VM backends), Ceylon, and more.

Perl has a way to inline other languages, but is only really targeted by Perl and by a really ancient version of PHP. The JVM is a bona fide target for so many. Even LLVM intermediate code has a tool to target the JVM, so basically any language with an LLVM frontend. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a PCode to JVM tool somewhere.

JavaScript has a few languages targeting it. WebAssembly has a bunch and growing, including C, Rust, and Go. That’s probably the closest thing to the JVM.

Prior to that I would frequently have issues (and still have issues with one-off random scripts that use system python).

No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.

There are differences, but they’re usually esoteric ( https://perldoc.perl.org/perlport#PLATFORMS ).

There's also Groovy.

I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?

Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.

#lazyweb

  > I can run basically any Perl code back to Perl 4 (March 1991) on Perl 5.40.2 which is current.

I'm only half joking. Perl has so many ways to do things, many of them obscure but preferable for specific cases. It's often a write-only language if you can't get ahold of the dev who wrote whatever script you're trying to debug.

I wonder if modern LLMs could actually help with that.

From experience, they can.

Java was marketed (at least in its early days) as a WORA language - WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE.

Perl was unmarketed as a WORM language - WRITE ONCE READ MANY (TIMES). ;)

jk, i actually like perl somewhat.

but I think Larry and team went somewhat overboard with that human-style linguistics stuff that they applied to perl.

e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.