I have always felt, despite the competition coming from .Net and the great strides made by the CLR, that Java’s future prospects as a [more or less] general purpose development platform were still pretty good because of its robust ecosystem. However, the acquisition by Oracle, I believe, spells the beginning of the end for this [...]
After having read about the “Da Vinci Machine”, http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/31/davinci-machine_1.html http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/ it struck me that Sun/the Java people have finally seen the wisdom of supporting other languages (esp. dynamic ones) on the JVM and have decided to play catch up with the CLR. The closest CLR analog to the Da Vinci Machine would be .NET’s DLR [...]