Of course we can expect people will create compilers (I believe some already have) to compile other languages down to the assembly used in the game.
The viruses/trojans will be an interesting thing, I believe notch said that it will be up to players to protect themselves from these.
There's a risk here though for essentially turing complete griefing, so hopefully there will be something to help protect newbies from accidentally running some horrible code.
(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)
I don't think it's about depth; you can't reply to very new comments (presumably to give people a chance to delete mistakes?) but if you refresh the page a minute or two later the reply link will be there as normal.
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Indeed: https://twitter.com/notch/status/187474819980328962
And I won't stop viruses, the players will have to do that themselves.
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And https://twitter.com/notch/status/187451555384004610 :
@Kyle_Baran: Is it possible for players to give malicious code that negatively affects their ship? This should be encouraged in multi.
@notch: yes. It's a fully functioning computer.
A great point. I can't wait for the first trojan that takes control of your ship and transfers control to a different player.
Will people be able to share binaries or just source?