I have no fondness for Java the language, but it would be a big shame if the JVM died, or stopped being actively developed. As a substrate for better languages

I have no fondness for Java the language, but it would be a big shame if the JVM died, or stopped being actively developed. As a substrate for better languages to run on, it offers a lot (e.g. world-class GC and JIT, cross-platform availability, good tool support). Java is verbose and clunky, but Ruby, Python, Scala and Clojure are all pretty good languages...