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Hope For Multi-Language Programming?
chthonicdaemon writes "I have been using Linux as my primary environment for more than ten years. In this time, I have absorbed all the lore surrounding the Unix Way — small programs doing one thing well, communicating via text and all that. I have found the command line a productive environment for doing many of the things I often do, and I find myself writing lots of small scripts that do one thing, then piping them together to do other things. While I was spending the time learning grep, sed, awk, python and many other more esoteric languages, the world moved on to application-based programming, where the paradigm seems to be to add features to one program written in one language. I have traditionally associated this with Windows or MacOS, but it is happening with Linux as well. Environments have little or no support for multi-language projects — you choose a language, open a project and get it done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependency generation and cross-platform support, unfortunately making it more difficult to grow a custom build process for a multi-language project organically. All this is a bit painful for me, as I know how much is gained by using a targeted language for a particular problem. Now the question: Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java/(insert other well-supported, popular language here) and unlearn ten years of philosophy, or is there hope for the multi-language development process?"
Did you replace the batteries in your smoke detector and in your sarcasm-ometer last fall?
Tk is never a good choice.
Tying stuff together with byte streams is incredibly primitive. That's why they had Lisp machines - everything is a Lisp object. Tying the world together with one language to rule them all is a far more powerful paradigm. The trouble is, not many languages are up to the task of such an exalted job. C certainly isn't. Lisp is. Some object languages are.
The missing link is an object file system. WHen the file system is all about byte streams it gives you the false impression that everything should boil down to byte streams. Wrong answer! Everything should boil down to objects. A Lisp machine + CLOS + an object file system. Common everyday OSes like Linux, Windows etc are holding back the future, but that's where we are right now.