[pgh-pm] one clarification from last night: other scripting languages

[Chris Winters]

Toward the end of the talk last night Barrie asked why I chose
JavaScript as the scripting interface for projects at work. I answered
that our framework was in Java so there wasn't a lot of choice.

Not true. There are a number of scripting engines available, even a
year and a half ago. There are Java-only ones like BeanShell, which
has been around for as long as Rhino and is fairly static, and Groovy,
which is Ruby-esque and had lots of press but as soon as it went into
a standardization process it seemed to fade from view.

There's also Jython (Python in Java), which has been around quite a
long time and is stable. But more recently the JRuby project has been
getting lots of attention, primarily because Sun hired the main
developer to work on it full-time.

Finally, there's a number of smaller languages like Pnuts (which IIRC
is perlish, but their site is down right now) and Scala, which focuses
on functional and other language features. There's a surprisingly
large list of scripting and other languages available on the VM,
although some of them venture into app/framework territory (like rules
engines):

http://www.robert-tolksdorf.de/vmlanguages.html

Chris