Polyglot Programming

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 Functional Programming, Object-Oriented Programming, and Aspect-Oriented Programming. I call this combination polyglot and poly-paradigm programming (PPP).

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 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 30 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 Adobe PDF.

For all my presentations, see here.

For more information, send me email.

1 Neal Ford may have been the first to coin this term.