Slashdot Mirror
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?"
One time at my company, a programmer who must have been in his 50s came in with a resume that had no less than 25 programming languages. I was interviewing him, so I asked him, "Which of all these languages do you like most?" I figured he'd have some nuanced answer dealing with precision in Ada or flexibility in Lisp, or the happiness of Perl. Nope. "Shell scripting" he said. My jaw nearly dropped. He said, "It easily lets me tie all these different building blocks together. No other language can do that." He didn't end up working with us but it was one of the most educational interviews I ever did. I like interviewing more experienced programmers, even if they don't end up working for us, just because something interesting ALWAYS happens. I could tell you stories........
As for the question, I think in part he's right, it is good to have a separate mailer from the browser from the calendaring program, and have ways for them to communicate. Some systems do work in this way, for example, most chess programs will let you change your chess engines, separating the front end from the back. Might want to check how they do it. Other programs on OS X will let you manipulate variables and send messages using applescript or automator. Also, on OS X, there's no reason to not use awk or sed. But definitely learn C++ and Java, they're used everywhere and once you know one, the other's not too difficult.
Maybe if you were more specific in the question you asked we could answer better? Or were you just trying to encourage all programmers on slashdot to program more modularly?
Qxe4
Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java?
Yes.
In my 10 years of professional development I've covered many languages, but the last three doing nothing but Java have been the happiest. The second happiest was doing nothing but C++. There's a wonderful economy of scale to focusing on a single technology, you don't waste time on the glue.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I was introduced to functional programming via C# 3.0, with the lambdas, LINQ, and better delegate support. Not quite "real" functional programming, but its a nice gateway drug, and have been hooked since then (thats background info just to say I'm no expert, but no dummy either).
F# is pretty slick. Its basically a "real" functional language, that still allows it to be easy to integrate with "real business", including databases, IO, and has great support for tooling since its based on .NET. So its pretty much the "perfect" functional language, for the "real" world. (I know many are better from a theoretical or scientific point of view, but i'm talking purely pragmatic here).
That said, I didn't use it much. What I can say, is we have an army of PhDs implementing -extremely- complex algorithms here (functions being passed around with several douzens levels of nested function types, to do very, very complex modeling in a couple lines of code...), and they swear my F# now (they've been using it since early technology previews, and are getting ready to push large amounts of code in it in production...its working awesome, supposingly).
Sorry I'm vague on the details... but what I can say, is its good enough for one of the largest linux-centric company in the world to shift some of its code to it. Nuff said :)