Not in this context, no. If you tell your boss you're deploying the solution "in a VM" and it turns out to be a .jar file, you're likely to be fired.
Context and convention are important. This subthread is filled with people who are technically right, but choosing to cheer for an unclear and idiosyncratic terminology. A VM means hardware virtualization. Choosing other meanings is at best confusing and at worst a terrible security bug.
Is it not the exact same concept underneath? An environment that provides a layer of abstraction by translating instructions into a standardized, transportable form that can be executed consistently, regardless of the underlying hardware or operating system?
I always thought that it made sense to use the word for both things, and I never even thought twice about it when people used it for programming languages.
It would have to be a very strange conversation for someone to misunderstand someone else in the way you mentioned.
Sure, in precisely the same way that a kitchen knife and a sword are the "exact same concept underneath". But if you use the words interchangeably you'll confuse people.
And I'll just repeat the point, if you tell your boss your web app is "running in a VM" when you just wrote it in Java, you'll be fired for some really terrible security analysis.
The use of Virtual Machine as in the article is old and well established in computer science. E.g in the LLVM (low-level virtual machine) compiler backend.
What do you mean with “in this context”? The article is clearly using the term in the same sense as JVM and LLVM.
(Also your relationship with you boss sounds pretty toxic. If there is ambiguity in the terminolgy why don’t you just ask a clarifying question? Many words can have multiple meanings.)
