Recently I have noticed that there are a lot of programming languages targeting the JVM. Aside for Java, there is Clojure, Groovy, Scala, JRuby, Jython, and Rhino, as well as a handful of other less notable languages.
It is interesting how all of these languages flocked to the JVM to bootstrap themselves into all of the work that has been done on a powerful bytecode runtime. Without doing any extra work they get platform portability and runtime optimization (maybe, I am not totally sure about this dark magic.).
It is interesting to ponder what might happen if Oracle stopped developing the JVM, or closed source future updates to it. All of these separate entities would have to come together to maintain the runtime, since they are essentially dependent upon it.
Even more interesting is the fact that if a programming language isn't running on the JVM, it is pretty likely it is a scripting language. Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript all require no compilation to run. It seems that the ideals of creating portable code have now been met with either the JVM or a script.
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