What word would you recommend I use to cover everything from Ruby to Java?
FWIW, I think you'll make the same mistake pretty often if you continue to think of folks who play in the MS pond as bozos. There are reasons MS is a leader in many markets.
Anything but 'managed' -- while conceptually it covers things quite nicely, in practice it's used almost exclusively to mean "runs on the CLR", by those living solely within the Microsoft ecosystem whose knowledge of programming languages comes from Microsoft marketing materials. It's a loaded term.
There's plenty of nomenclature abuse in that ecosystem, like using 'assemblies' to refer to packages or 'blittable' for SHM.
'Garbage Collected' (or GCed) works fine instead of 'managed', especially since 'runs on a VM' is pretty nebulous, and the whole C++/CLI thing adds some confusion.
I don't use it to exclusively mean CLR-hosted, and to be frank, I think the meaning is pretty clear outside of MS contexts. I believe "GCed" focuses too much on the memory allocation strategy; which while important for many of the practical advantages of managed languages, I think it ends up lopsided.
Finally, more people using a word in an alternative way is the path to controlling its meaning, rather than avoiding the word altogether, cf "queer" and the like.
What meaning does "managed" have to you? I wasn't aware of a generic meaning. A virtual-machine-based language that happens to include garbage collection?
Generally it means type-safe and memory-safe, at least by default; is not usually precompiled (in practice precompilation is avoided for linking flexibility); and has a runtime which is at least nominally independent of the programs that run on it, e.g. that would need separate installation if not packaged as part of a larger environment.
The combination of type and memory safety usually requires a garbage collector, though it's not strictly necessary.
> Anything but 'managed' -- while conceptually it covers things quite nicely, in practice it's used almost exclusively to mean "runs on the CLR"
Evidence? I know at least one Mozilla dev who calls JavaScript "managed". I call such languages "managed" too, and I write much more non-CLR code than CLR code.
FWIW, I think you'll make the same mistake pretty often if you continue to think of folks who play in the MS pond as bozos. There are reasons MS is a leader in many markets.