We had a share-session on Polyglot programming the other day, after Mark returned from SDWest 2008.
Tonight, I had an evil thought:
Half of these languages are ones most in the audience have neither seen nor played with–what if you added some “trick” language names to the slides to see how full of crap your audience was. It’s a play on the same allegory from “The Emperor’s New Clothes”:
“…yes, and so your application logic should be components written in a systems language like java [sic], with the higher-level being in a dynamic language like JavaScript, Ruby, or Dimebag.”
“Dimebag?
“Yes, you’ve surely heard of it! It’s a language represented using flickr images manipulated using 4D Holographic gloves that parallelize any algorithm using only 2 lines of code. And it compiles down to machine independent machine code.”
…
“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that. Just testing you.”
Manager: “Say, could we rewrite the dashboard in Dimebag? Sounds very interesting.”
I’m all for knowing several languages with different target domains, but one jarring thing about my time spent in Win32 land: The developers typically know C and C++, and that’s it. And that’s all they NEED to know, since they’re conentrating on the problem at hand, not the newest way to rewrite quicksort in fewer lines. (Yes, yes…I’m a languages fanboi, sue me!)
There’s much to be said for people who concentrate on solving the problem first, then focus on how to solve it in the best, fastest, most maintainable way.