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Comment by Dn_Ab | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting languages are being built for both the CLR and JVM. On the JVM the main ones I know of are Scala, Clojure and Kotlin. I think ClojureScript deserves mention even if a dialect due to the thoughts it allows one to think more easily (LightTable).

The CLR also has lots of very interesting languages under development. Languages like F# and Nemerle. Microsoft Research also pump out cutting edge stuff like the dependently typed F* (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fstar/) and in language support for probabilistic programming http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/fun/. The problem with MSR stuff is that their licences are so cumbersome and restrictive.

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ClojureScript doesn't run on either the CLR or JVM; the compiler is JVM-based Clojure but the output runs as JS. And it's worth noting that Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin all originated outside of Sun; where F# originated from inside Microsoft.

Yes, that's why I made a note of its dialect nature. But I still count it as something that sprung from interesting work in the JVM community that deserves to be noticed on its own. In this case, the output as javascript is almost incidental, the more interesting results is the language-browser interaction it allows.

It does not matter where the research got done as long as it's interesting and moves things forward. Anyways, the cultures of MS and MSR are so different, it is arguable if one can even consider MSR as part of Microsoft. Sort of like Hong Kong and China. MSR fund a lot of haskell work for example.

Actually, ClojureScript worked just fine in Rhino, JS implementation that ships with the JDK, last time I checked.

Fantom has had support for the JVM and the CLR since it first came out. It has subsequently added JavaScript as an output language.

I've been wondering why Fantom doesn't seem to get the respect or play that some of these others have. Is it because it courts both camps, so neither wants to use it? It's a neat language, although perhaps not very revolutionary compared to these.

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