code-dog

Good point - what is clojure actually for?

... and you have to work really hard to make C or C++ run any faster than the JVM. For all normal levels of programmer effort there is no difference or the JVM is faster.

I see your point, but then money is money. So, why pay MS anything? Why is computing treated in this unique way where minimizing cost is not standard practice?

Oracle moving on from the 1.6 doldrums was a huge plus for Java and the JVM. Now the buzz is around 1.8 with lambdas and enhancements to performance of invoke dynamic.

Makes sense - the JVM is fast and stable. It comes with a huge array of tooling and its own built in debugging system. It is well supported and cross platform. Why would you not want to take advantage of all that good stuff?

Yes! Someone gets it!

In this case a team could work across the project. One on the parser/lexer one on AST translation, one of code generation, Two on the runtime and 1 on build/ci. I think that makes 6.

That is true. As someone who thinks both ways (craft and day job) the issue with Scala (that with which I have the most experience) is the tooling.