I Has a Register

On a slightly more serious note, I notice Joe Gregorio's interesting observations on the ascendancy of virtual machines in the professionalization of scripting languages:

So by now everyone should have seen the SquirrelFish announcement. And MagLev. And you've [seen] Steve Yegge's presentation, ”Dynamic Languages Strike Back”…
All of those things on their own are interesting, but what's more important is that we're talking about them all at the same time. There's real research going on to produce faster VMs and that research is being applied to real scripting languages today. What we are priveleged to witness, something that wasn't happening a year ago, and will probably be complete in another year or two, is the professionalization of scripting languages. There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you'd have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won't be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc….

It's a good read, and anyone interested in the language-geek aspects of LOLCODE would do well to think on it. I'd like to think that LOLCODE is either the thin end of the wedge of that interest or a popular protest against the tendency towards powerful scripting languages.

Oh, and sorry to those of you who saw some chaos on the RSS feed. There were a couple of bumps in the server migration, but it looks to be better now.