Welcome to the programming language explosion [Video]

Let a thousand languages bloom and cross-pollinate

Credit: Tee11 / Shutterstock

Microsoft could be right — maybe we will write our projects in seven languages for one platform. When interviewing language inventors Gavin King (Ceylon), Rich Hickey (Clojure), and Charles Nutter (Ruby) for my previous article, one detail stuck out. For the most part, they take on faith the idea of “polyglot” software development.

Years ago, the former chair of the ECMA .Net CLI standards board, Sam Ruby, gave a talk to the Triangle Java Users Group. He ended his presentation on .Net with a cheeky quote that I paraphrase from memory: “If you want to write one project in seven languages for one platform, choose .Net. If you want to write one project in one language for seven platforms, choose Java.” The user group responded to this dig at Microsoft with a standing ovation.

For a long time, mission-critical business software was written in Cobol and/or RPG if it was …