Welcome to
Polyglot Programming

Welcome

Polyglot Programming¹ is a website dedicated to exploring the benefits (and drawbacks) of combining multiple programming languages and multiple "modularity paradigms" in application development. The "paradigms" include Object-Oriented Programming, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, etc.

I call this combination polyglot and poly-paradigm programming (PPP), to give it a somewhat catchy name.

PPP is not a new idea. One of the most successful applications of all time is Emacs, which is still widely used even though it is over twenty years old. Emacs succeeded because it combines a fast kernel written in C, which gives Emacs speed and access to operating system services, combined with a scripting engine that uses a Lisp dialect called Emacs Lisp (or ELisp, for short). Most of the functionality of Emacs is implemented in ELisp. It is this scripting capability that has made Emacs so easy to adapt, even by end users, to meet changing needs over the past 20 years.

This site is an outgrowth of my work with clients on this topic, as well as industry trends. You can read more about my ideas on polyglot programming in this presentation.

I also blog about it at my blog and at the Object Mentor blog.

News:

November 13, 2008: I posted my introduction to Scala, The Seductions of Scala (Zip). I hacked-up a presentation tool that Dave Thomas created, which is based on S5. To view the presentation, open html/all.html in a browser. The code used in the slides is in the code directory.