One of the trends I’ve been seeing and liking over the last couple of years is a complete decoupling of the programming language that a given piece of functionality is written in and the ecosystem in which it is executed. That’s the huge power of the Mono.NET platform. Lots of people think that the only way you can write .NET software is to do it in C# or VB.NET and deploy on Windows. That’s not even remotely true. As of this writing, there are 55 languages you can use to write .NET assemblies and executables.

Once compiled, any of those assemblies can be used from any one of the other languages and it works. And, for the most part, you can then also run them on Mono on Linux and any of the other platforms Linux runs on.

I said all of that to say that finding that these guys managed to get a 4-fold increase in speed for Drupal (the PHP portal management/CMS tool) by running it in a Java environment to be an exciting revelation.

Why?

Because when you achieve this level of decoupling, you use programming languages because of how they let you *work* instead of worrying about how they *run*. If a tool or library or framework can let you cut your development time in half, you can use it, despite the runtime not being the quickest. Deploying it becomes a secondary task and can be optimized separately.

Now, we’re not entirely there yet, but there’s surprisingly large pockets of this stuff popping up and I’ll be standing over here in the cheering section.