While I see his point regarding excessive memory usage WRT the JVM, I don’t think this matters much. The fact is memory is cheap these days and the convenience

While I see his point regarding excessive memory usage WRT the JVM, I don’t think this matters much. The fact is memory is cheap these days and the convenience of the JVM is something that’s tough to overlook. Furthermore, while a Hello World app may require 100MB when implemented on the JVM, much of that is overhead which will stay relatively constant as your process grows more complex (to a point, obviously). I can run multiple processes on the same JVM instance and stay within reasonable memory bounds. Also, we need to consider the alternative. Where would we go if we didn’t have the JVM? It’s not like .Net is much better in this regard. We could go without a system as heavyweight as these two but then we lose all the advantages that come along with that weight. Certainly, those advantages are not needed for a lot of purposes. Looking at what he’s running I would say he probably doesn’t need the weight of the JVM. That said, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do my current project anywhere but the JVM (well, okay, they’re all Turing machines so technically I can, but bear with me). I’ll gladly fork over the cash for a beefier VPS if it that’s the cost of the JVM. Full disclosure: I am considered a Scala evangelist.