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Hope For Multi-Language Programming?

Posted by Soulskill on from the one-and-done dept.

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?"

6 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. So you want to learn object oriented now? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Funny

    That sounds like an unfortunate step into another layer of short-lived languages. Learn how to actually program: learn C.

  2. Re:Languages by CarpetShark · · Score: 4, Funny

    If I had serious text processing, I'd use Perl. And do.

    I have serious text processing to do every time I see perl's syntax ;)

  3. so ... by reiisi · · Score: 2, Funny

    the mods were reversed, too.

    The moderators expected all the slashdot crowd to understand what was going on, right?

    ;->

    --
    Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
  4. Re:Yes by harry666t · · Score: 4, Funny

    $ PS1=""

    Oh, no! The command prompt disappeared.....

  5. Re:Huh? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Funny

    Anyway, there's plenty of room for multi-language programming. One example of this is SOAP. Another example is CORBA.

    is this your argument for or against multi-language programming? :)

  6. Re:StupidPeopleTrick by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Funny

    "The more languages, the more of a pain for support, debugging, and dev hand-off."

    You forgot to add job security to that. :-)

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