The design patterns used in Joomla are, in my humble opinion, abstract enough to allow them to be implemented in other programming languages. Adobe Flex 2 is promoting a new way of developing flash web applications.
My idea is to write the base design patterns in AS 3.0 and run the Flex CMS using a JServer and a request/response xml pattern that can mark the communication between our flex/flash web site and the joomla database.
The framework could allow the design of specific containers in our database, by this I mean developing components/modules for the joomla driven web site, or design an entire web site using flash, and joomla for database related operations.
The key for this is the communication pattern that we use between the JServer and JFlexServer ( this are names that I propose). Flex is a lot easier to use than PHP, although once we can apply design patterns in development the programming language is of little concern

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This is the direction I think Joomla could approach in the not so distant future. Hope you'll find it interesting.