Sun in a language soup

For over a decade Sun has been branding Java as the programming language of choice and building new capabilities around the Java framework, interestingly their approach has been to position the language (Java) along with the framework (Java Enterprise Edition, Java Standard Edition etc). Now Sun is contemplating something the .NET framework had since its inception - support for multiple languages. With languages such as Ruby gaining significant adoption by the developer community neither Microsoft or Sun could back away from adopting Ruby – for Microsoft the implementation of another language like Ruby (IronRuby in this case) would be seamless since they would primarily have to make their implementation of ruby Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) compliant. From a technical perspective Sun would not have a significant challenge implementing Ruby (ie the Da Vinci Machine Project) but what would be the message they are sending to the developer community? Will they reposition the JVM? Will it be rebranded? What will happen to all those acronyms in the Java community (JSP, JSF, JNI, JNDI, EJB etc - and 100s of other popular acronyms prefixed with the 'J' moniker), for that matter you cant call it the Java community can you ? J . Wow think about it a community focusing on a platform unified by a single language – now possibly repositioning the framework in another language(s). Chaos.

Should be interesting to see how Sun and the community pulls it off.