UPDATE: Look, I am NOT making fun of your post in any way. I think it's fair game to poke a little at his comments given that there has been no other mention of this, no roadmap, nothing. But I respect your post and the fact that you pushed a little further and tried to find some corroboration for his statement.
I'd like to think that somewhere in Oracle-land, there's a white paper from the Sun days talking about this idea, and maybe they're even trying to make it fly right now. And good job teasing that out and asking some intelligent questions about what it may mean.
All that said, I'm happy enough to be Charlie Brown and take a run at this football. Cynicism leads to either resigning myself to using Javascript forever for client side stuff, something I just couldn't swallow psychologically.
"The good parts" of Javascript get a lot of play, but I don't want to have cope by using patterns and avoiding the dull, broken bits that go along for the ride...and I'm surprised that many (most?) other competent developers that wouldn't put up with such compromises in their "real" languages aren't as irritated about Javascript as I have been.
How do you explain the recent widespread enthusiasm for Node.js, including from server-side engineers with little to no previous JavaScript experience?
The same can be said for any programming language that you don't like.
gorram it, jwz.
"This gives our customers a sense of security that if anything should happen to become important in the future, they will have purchased from a vendor that has a vision for embracing the technology even if there is no roadmap for actually implementing the technology.
"And although they may not ever end up benefitting from the technology, their careers are safe because they made a decision that, at the time, was prudent, namely to standardize on a technology that was thought to be on its way to becoming ubiquitous from a vendor that articulated a strategy for achieving ubiquity."
tl;dr: "F.U.D."