The Power of Multi-Language Applications

wbav queries: "I've been programming for a number of years, and someone always asks, 'What language do you use, Java or C++?'. Now personally, I find that question a little biased, mainly because, of how I program. Rather than making one massive program, adding in all the support I need to make up for weaknesses in languages, I prefer to make several different apps that call each other, each using the strengths of that particular language. I tend to use C++ as my controlling program, and then execute Perl, PHP, or Java depending on what will give me the best performance for and cause me the least amount of pain to accomplish the task at hand. Do you guys use this kind of method, or do you try to do everything in one program? What advantages or disadvantages do you see in creating one program compared to many programs?"

Comments

well

[djweis]

I can see some merit in that, but if you pass on maintenance to someone else, you could have just increased the number of people required to support the project, or require the new developers to learn more new languages before they can be useful. It's easier to find someone skilled in foo than to find someone that knows foo, bar, baz, etc.

oh god yes

[jabbo]

I'd go insane if I tried to use a compiled language for frequently-changing applications (eg. web interfaces to purchasing systems, database large object manipulation & indexing, etc.) but likewise I'd grow old waiting for things to happen if the cores weren't in C.

Personally I dislike C++ because I find it harder to port than ANSI C. But I wrote plenty of it when I was learning how to program (before I learned Scheme and Perl and Java and got some latitude in my paradigms). Either C or C++ is great for speed and hooking into the OS or an Apache module or whatever. It's also less tempting for admins or rookies to mess with C code because bad code may not compile.

On the other hand, object-oriented (or at least modular) PHP and Perl code, and decently-written Java code, is much easier to adapt to changing demands. I stick with PHP and Perl, myself, and I use Perl as kind of a glue-core layer between C applications and PHP interfaces. If I had more time I'd probably write the hooks as PHP extensions, but Perl is just so damn powerful when you use it right.

I'm not sure what people are thinking when they specify that everything on a project "needs" to be done in Java or whatever. It's not particularly hard to use my code, since it's all just calls to libraries that automagically do the hard stuff. More importantly, I tend to use POD or Javadoc-style comments in everything, and don't put it anywhere else. That way I am forced to keep it all up to date, because that's where *I* remind myself what arguments to feed what methods!

Re:Quite the Contrary

[plover]

I, too, am working on a large programming project. It's primarily written in C++, but I use other languages to write quick-n-dirty tests for the objects.

A curious side benefit I've found is that when I cross language boundaries, I tend to expose more flaws than if I just had a small main() testing the objects. Crossing language boundaries forces me to code the interface to each object very properly and distinctly.

John

Re:This is not human languages!

[scrytch]

Imperative languages are pretty much isomorphic. Learn one that's sufficiently rich and you pretty much know 'em all.

The story gets different when you start with other paradigms. Try teaching yourself Haskell or prolog in a morning. And it's languages like that that are often a reason to pick one over the other, because the problem space demands it. I could write a web form processor with db access in any language ... but trying to write a fraud detection system in C is like trying to build a house with a hammer (actually the fraud detection system I'm thinking of was written in APL ... yowza)