I know this will immediately mark me as a heretic, but I am a long time and current Emacs user, so this comes from a place of love, really :o) -- I believe the best thing for Emacs would be to be rewritten in Clojure with Clojure as the scripting language. This would:
* Maintain the Lisp culture
* Speed up the whole enterprise
* Allow multithreading
* Remove the need for most external programs
* Work across platforms (many Emacs extensions or programs rely on Unix commands which don't come with Emacs)
* Provide the ability to apply a decent UI - not that I have any on my Emacs - I turn the toolbar off, but dialogs for projects / browsers could be better (read: "not suck")
* Would allow the ability to immediately get a bunch of proper language parsers like Yegge's JS mode - all the ANTLR parsers are immediately available to use in Clojure and would give emacs the language-aware goodness that Eclipse and Netbeans have.
OK shoot me now, but I think it would be awesome :o)
Well, I'm very impressed with the asm.js numbers - its lead over the JVM is really unexpected (to me, at least). I've not been a JS fan, but if asm.js can pull out this kind of performance at this early stage then perhaps this really could work as an 'bytecode for the web'. That would be nice because it would allow a common compilation target for people to output to from whatever their favourite language - which is clearly a better situation that 'whatever language you like so long as it's JavaScript' :o)
As a long time Java programmer who's other favourite languages are Lisp (and C!) I'm really excited about this. I understand Java programmers who say that this will not change anything in the sense that these operations were functionally possible previously and are no more so now. However J8 does this with way less code and for those who like the idiom, this is a real step forward.
Even just making anonymous classes less wordy is a huge win IMO.
Java makes a very good bytecode for the web. Applets today are much faster and better integrated than they were when all the hype was about. Java's difficulties are all political. Reading HN will show that regardless of any technical merits Java has, a large number of people will not use the JVM because they consider Java an uncool language or believe that it's still as slow as it was 10 years ago.
Personally, I'm excited about Google's new foray into this territory. While I believe that the JVM is a better option right here and now, coding fashionistas aren't going to touch Java and Oracle's litigious attitude is likely to repel people who would invest in the platform expanding on the web. I believe a bytecode for the web is absolutely the best solution and I want it to happen whoever provides the technology. If Google's attempt gets used, it will get optimised and maybe in a decade be as performant as the JVM is now. That is preferable to Javascript being the ONLY game in town.
That was the part I found particularly funny. As a New Zealander, I'm horrified by what the US Patent Office has done to the world of Software Engineering. This whole Imaginary Property push has had a chilling effect in IT and has erected huge barriers to entry into technical fields.
Far from being the envy of the world, the US Patent System is widely despised and ridiculed.
Fantastic post. I think you succinctly sum up what is worst about HN. Lots of people here like FP. Great! Use it, but spare us the interminable circle jerks.
Obligatory response: history is littered with people who have said that things are impossible which have since been done. I don't believe that the realm of the possible has just stopped expanding right now. Do you?
I find this HN concept of the Java programmer as a 'blub' programmer really offensive.
I've coded C,C++ for years. I really like Lisp, Clojure, Python. I've dabbled with Haskell and OCaml. And I LIKE JAVA and NOT because I'm old, stupid or don't fucking know better.
The Java ecosystem has a range of solutions to this problem that actually work. I know it's not trendy or anything, but it works. Depends on what's more important to you, I guess.