Virtual Surreality
It’s too real to be true

A little while ago, my ThoughtWorks colleague Neal Ford was discussing Polyglot Programming.

He highlights a renewed interest in a diversity of programming languages, particularly those that display constructs that are dynamic, functional, or declarative. Those of us that have been around a while don’t actually think this is a new thing. I’ve learned over 15 languages to proficiency in my 21 years of programming and was looking at the DDJ and Byte CDs for alternative languages well over a decade ago.

Today in Sydney (and later this week in Melbourne), Scott Shaw from our Melbourne office is presenting a ThoughtWorks Quarterly Technology Briefing with the following magnificent title: “Are Dynamic Languages the Next Big Thing? Fight Bloatware to Achieve Faster Time to Market. What IT Decision Makers Need to Know About the New Dynamic Languages”.

At a point in his presentation, Scott asks if corporate IT developers can be polyglot programmers. I asked if it’s all just Greek to them. (Hilarious? It’s gold, Jerry, gold!).

I’m figuring that “it depends”. It depends largely on the level of software craft they employ or enjoy. It depends on the environment they work in and whether a Renaissance view and humanist learning is encouraged. It depends on whether they are seen as, or see themselves as, monkeys pounding keyboards until something good enough is churned out.

Some less esoteric thoughts:

• The difference between C-derivative languages has been minimal until recently.
• Perl is dynamic and has some neat features but appears to have lost the plot on simplicity and expressiveness (Perl 6 is even further off beam).
• Java and C# are mostly object-oriented (although applications written in them generally aren’t)
• Java has incorporated Doug Lea’s fine concurrency package into the API, providing some effective, if somewhat inorganic (due to the nature of Java) concurrency features, and continues that through at least Java 7 with his ongoing work.
• Java and C# are now incorporating dynamic features into the programming model (BSF, DuckTyping).
• More importantly, C# 3.0 incorporates some of the fine language research from Microsoft Labs and includes declarative and functional features (Linq, lamdas).

Some languages you should know about today:

• Ruby. If you’ve used Lisp, Smalltalk, Python or Perl, you’ll probably want to give this one a whirl. If you’re using Excel or Access to glue enterprise data together, learn it - you’re going to have to know it soon. If you’re building a web application that does what most of the other web applications do, learn it and Rails - you’re going to have to know it soon.
• Erlang. If you can hear the avalanche of demands for highly-available, concurrent, non-monolithic processing in business applications coming, start learning. You’ll also understand the purpose of ForkJoinTasks in JSR166y / Java 7.
• Haskell. If you want to understand how high order functions contribute to effective DSLs, or how concurrent life becomes easier when you do away with global mutable state, give it a go. You’ll truly grok the concurrency features in JSR166y / Java 7. Also making some headway in the game software space. Scary syntax, but not as scary as Lisp. It’s a “Maybe Language” (mildly hilarious Haskell in joke).

All of them have growing IDE support (at least Eclipse and IntelliJ, some Visual Studio) and varying levels of development tools (Rake, RSpec, and Migrations will impress).

You could wait until C# and Java catch up with building these features in as core constructs in the language, making them more idiomatic, less cumbersome and error-prone than the bolt-on after-thoughts they largely are now (C# has done a better job). Or you could understand and utilise them from first principles now. Even if you don’t actually program in such languages on a day-to-day basis as part of your accountant-like job (although we believe the change is inevitable), you’ll at least approach the same problems with fresh insight while using your more pervasive language.

As those that speak Greek might say: Τι περιμένεις (What are you waiting for?)