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?"

Comments

do not sweat it and enjoy!

[jackb_guppy]

The world ebbs and flow. One day it C, another RPG or CL or ADA or PHP or ...

Do what you like to do.

What you may want to, is join a project that is more inline with Linux as whole versus a single app. Ubuntu or another general distro, or help with a small single use distro like IPCop. They should be glad to have some one like you help out.

Eclipse

[setagllib]

Eclipse is a fantastic platform for multi-language development, especially if your primary languages are C, C++, Python, Ruby, etc.

All you need to do is create a C++ Makefile Project, then use the makefile to wrap your build system (e.g. ant, scons, actual makefile, whatever). You can build any number of binaries and launch them (or scripts) from the powerful launch profile system.

Basically, Eclipse projects have "facets" - they can cram in features from multiple language development kits and mostly remain compatible. You still sometimes have to do the glue work yourself, but in general C/C++/Python are very easy to mesh. It is therefore easy to have a project with C libraries being loaded by Python, and so on.

Re:Languages

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Properly written swing is fine, and i have used without complaints from clients. It looks and performs rather well with openJDK. The problem is that 99% of swing out there are by 1st year students learning how to write any code at all, let alone competent GUI front end. But it is just another gui api with all the pros and cons that seem to come with them all.