BigBlue IbmCorporation has this (new since Y2K?) LanguageEnvironment terminology that arrested my attention recently. A colleague of mine was responsible for introducing a new version of CobolLanguage, which has warnings about new (could be indeterministic) compiled behaviour for this legacy language. And it was described in a migration planning guide for the LanguageEnvironment.

After looking at the ForDummies material at  http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/le/conference/pdf/Sf8201.pdf , I come to conclude that it has similarities to MicrosoftCorporation CommonLanguageRuntime (CLR).

Am I far off on my guesses that followed? It appeared that sometime in the late nineties the software vendors (IBM, MS, etc) got convinced by academics that they needed this LanguageEnvironment thing to get programming languages meet the needs of a globalized economy. And for that to happen, the research computer scientists must have trained the IT graduates of the eighties that such environments are essential to continued software productivity.

Other questions include:
* has the Unixes and Linuxes got this LanguageEnvironment thing
* is the JavaVirtualMachine adequately serving the needs of a LanguageEnvironment

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CategoryEnterpriseComputingConcerns