Language Remix

I stumbled across an interesting paper on polyglot programming here.

I am convinced more than ever that in the war of programming languages, it is impossible for one language to outshine others. So should we start looking at things differently? Should we move our focus away from trying to pick a winner?

A few trends are worth taking note of.

- Developers are not scared anymore to experiment with different programming languages and styles. While they still have favourites, they are increasingly using the most suitable language or tool for a given job. This is a welcome change from the days when we were 'shoehorning' every solution into one tool or technology.

- IDEs allow one to seamlessly integrate different tools and technologies into one platform.

- Virtual machines have brought the languages closer to each other in such a way that the language has become merely a tool for expression. Code written in one or mixed languages produces the same byte code so the run time environment has become language agnostic.

These trends suggest that the time is ripe to try out a polyglot approach to development and see if it has any real benefits or not. The paper above makes a convincing argument in favor of polyglot programming.