There are a lot of popular programming languages out there, each popular for being good at a particular thing. The C family languages are fastest and have a giant legacy. Perl is a favoured choice for text manipulations. Today's darling is Ruby, leader of the agile movement. Python is a cleaner, high-level language. PHP aims at the quick web/HTML scripter language and has a simpler access to SQL databases than most. Java's a common choice for large projects, with lots of class libraries, slower than C but faster than interpreted languages.
However, my goal here is not to debate the merits of these languages, which are only barely summed up above (and no doubt incorrectly to some perceptions.) My goal is to point out that we all love our different languages for different purposes. And more to the point, one of the reasons we love a particular language is that we *know it*. In many cases we might decide we could more quickly solve a problem in a language we know well, even though another language might be better suited overall.
Sometimes I'm sitting coding in one of the more concrete languages, like C or Java, and I think to myself, "This problem would be 2 lines in Perl." It would probably be slower, and perl would not be a suitable choice for the whole project, so I spend the time to solve the problem in the language I'm coding.
Many of the languages have mechanisms to deal with foreign or "native" methods, ie. to deal with objects or functions from another language. Most of these systems are clunky. You would not use them for 3 lines of code, nor would it be particularly readable.
So I propose being able to "switch languages" in the middle of a piece of code. You're programming in C, and suddenly you break out into perl, to so something you immediately know how to do in perl. You get access to the core data types of the original language, and as much of the complex ones as can be made simple. If you need to get real in-depth access to the complex data types of the other language, go back to its foreign methods interface and write a remote function.
Read on... read more »
