With Fortress, Sun researchers want to change how high-performance computing is done and allow scientists to program more closely to their own domain, he added. Goals include allowing for abstraction and reuse without overhead, making errors easier to correct and detect and making it easier for parallelism and distribution.

"The most important thing to know about Fortress is that it is parallel. In fact, it's really parallel," said Allen.

Although Fortress follows in the footsteps of Java in the area of syntax, it is a separate language, one that has been in development for three years.

"Our strategy with Fortress is to foster community development by establishing a series of open source projects for the language," and seeding them with initial code and contributing extensions, Allen said.

At Microsoft, Nikhil Kothari, an architect on on that firm's "Atlas" team, is working in his spare time on a project called Script#, which enables developers to more easily leverage C# skills to build JavaScript, according to Microsoft. Atlas is a framework for building rich Web applications on top of ASP.Net 2.0; it is planned for inclusion in the upcoming "Orcas" release of the Visual Studio development tools platform.