The CLR as insulation
I just wrote this as part of an upcoming article (Watch for the whole piece in March .NET DJ). I think it's fair use to quote myself, right? I've spent the past week trying to write these two paragraphs. They may not be perfect, but they're good enough to share.
Virtual Execution Environments should be wonderful insulation against the vagaries of fashion. By providing a reasonably wide range of services it should be possible to accomodate next year’s fashionable ideas in a way that solidly integrates with the has-beens of today. Richly featured runtimes should even make it easier than ever before to experiment with new ideas – it’s dramatically easier to write a compiler that compiles to IL or bytecode than it is to implement one that does everything in raw assembly languages.
The tricky part is making sure that the runtime doesn’t make too many assumptions about how source languages will want to use it. Biases in the runtime make things easier for some languages at the expenses of others. Since it’s very hard to know what the next “cool” model will be it is important to try to remain as free of bias as possible without trying to be all things to all people. This is the tightrope the managed platform will have to walk as it evolves over the next few years. If it manages to keep up then the managed platform might still be around even after Object-Oriented programming goes into the hopper with all our old REO Speedwagon records.[me]
12:08:58 AM 
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