(I don't think HN is conducive to point-by-point, nor do I necessarily think it's a good form of debate, so I'll just leave it at this:) I'm happy for you to d

(I don't think HN is conducive to point-by-point, nor do I necessarily think it's a good form of debate, so I'll just leave it at this:) I'm happy for you to do F500 consulting, but I don't think you've actually come up with anything persuasive. I can't say I've actually tried Smalltalk IDEs, but as I understand them they have a "repeatability" problem: could one and did you do distributed version control with your Smalltalk code? Other than copying images around? (I fully acknowledge that IDEs provide value for Java and Scala, but that's because those languages are fundamentally broken, from my perspective at least. This has nothing to do with the JVM, obviously.) Re: Graal. Yes, perhaps in future. I'm talking about now. I can postulate any number of wonderful things that'll happen in the future... that won't acutally happen. "Develop on Windows and deploy on X". If you have good enough QA you can get away with that, but I happened regularly on my (former) team that someone used "C:/whatever" as a path name in their configuration... which wouldn't work on Linux machines, obviously. Unfortunately not all of us have the luxury of working in an environment which has ample resources for QA and Integration Testing or what have you. I can fully agree that if you have enough resources, JVM is going to work just fine for you. I just don't think it's anywhere near optimal on the result/(effort+expense) scale.