Right, V8 is a really well written runtime with some amazing accomplishments in it, I say that because I don't want what I am about to say to detract from that fact.
While it is true that Node.js/V8 is fast and in some areas faster than the JVM, one has to remember that Node.js is a very light framework. You don't have all of the underlining runtime support that you get with the JVM.
They are kind of different philosophies, where the JVM supports a robust runtime (it's all bolted together for you). Node.js/V8 is a very spartan runtime (you bolt on what you want/need). This certainly has an effect on resource utilization and speed.
That bring said, I like runtimes that I can bolt together. I hope WebOS does well under it's new stewardship. We need variety in this space.
This would actually be a terrible idea. Imagine all the rewriting of every little business app people have written for their blackberries, and the instant obsolescence of BES servers. No, RIM just needs to innovate in a way that doesn't seem half-assed.
Presumably if RIM switched to Android, they would port all their apps (like the much-beloved mail client) to Android and possibly even have a J2ME VM to run old third-party Blackberry apps.
Yeah; I grew up as something of a dog person and liked/loved our general property dog plus my father's hunting dogs (short haired pointers, about the nicest breed in the world) that I took care of ... but within a quarter century or so I became allergic to dogs in general (not sure why, having had terrible allergies all my life).
This sort of thing sounds like something you could make work in special cases but could fall apart in all sorts of ways. E.g. I show up to interview at your office (at which time I'd immediately start reacting), and I'd have to say sorry, I like the office dog(s) but I can work here only if you banish them and seriously clean the carpets....
OpenSolaris had a GNU userland. The BSD ancestry of the Solaris userland isn't the problem. The problem was the senseless defaults and cryptic command structures ("shutdown -g0 -i5 -y" instead of "shutdown")
Here is a barbaric and senseless default. Do a crontab -e without $EDITOR set and you'll be dropped into ed. I realize that it's the "standard editor" but the joke stopped being funny when I needed to edit a file with it.
Some of his arguments are crap. How is extensive platform support a detractor? Wouldn't you want your language to work on as many platforms as possible? I'm not sure how "outdated" stdlib is, but just because the code was written years ago, that does not make it "bad". New ways of implementing certain things could actually be slower. Can't say for sure since he has no real examples.
FYI: I dislike python for its syntax, but I can see why people like it. I just use perl for most everything that people would do in python.
