Submission + - 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 commandline 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 done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependancy 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 targetted 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?"
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 done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependancy 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 targetted 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?"
