A morning with Dave Thomas, the other Dave

Today I spent a very enjoable morning with Dave Thomas. (http://www.davethomas.net/) Not the Pragmatic Programming Dave Thomas, aka Prag Dave.
The talk was about programming 2010-2020. In other words, not what the next big thing is, but something way in the future. Most of the talk was on DOD – Domain Oriented Development. For concrete details, the problem is that this stuff is being developed inside corporations. It is not publically available.
Still, after the session a group of talked about some trends happening in the nearer term. It was a good chance to think about these things.
Both Microsoft and Sun are adding dynamic languages and better support of these in the CLR and JVM respectively. A good discussion for the motivation here can be found at http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292.
To quote:
“There is growing interest in running a variety of programming languages on the the Java platform, and consequently, on the Java virtual machine (JVM). This interest is increasingly focused on dynamically typed languages, in particular scripting languages.
To make it easier to produce performant, high quality implementations of such languages, we propose to add support at the virtual machine level.”
Dave is still a dedicated Smalltalker as are a number of the leading OOers. Maybe things are moving in that direction. Closures are something on their way into Java 7 (Dolphin) and C#. Closures, though introduced in Scheme, were a feature of Smalltalk, and one that has been missing from Java.
Of course if you want to do Smalltalk on a JVM, you could use http://www.missionsoft.com/. Not sure how well it works.