Newbie needs to see a large project

[Alan Gauld]

On 08 Oct 2003 17:04:24 +0100, jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) wrote:

> Unfortunately, people (especially management) have caught the meme
> that says "using multiple languages is bad".  This has a very sensible
> core, of course: a tower of babel of languages is very bad for code
> maintenance.  

I have to disagree on this one, I've never heard this particular
meme before.

But every project I've ever worked on used multiple languages
- C/C++, VB, SQL, Awk, Perl, ksh
all on a single project, and that's pretty standard.

On mainframes it would read:
- COBOL, SQL, JCL, REXX, FOCUS

I'd say the average was about 4 languages per project, with the
maximum being 12 (which really was getting to be too many to be
honest!)

But a single language approach doesn't make sense on any
significant project, it just takes too long to write all the
tools, test harnesses etc in low level languages.

> compare, say, Python and C with Java and conclude that Java is better
> because it's one language instead of two!

Absolutely.

> Why don't business users understand these arguments, or believe
> people's experiences?  

Because they believe high powered consultancies, like Gartner, 
Forester etc... rather than their own people!

And because they live in hpe of finding the silver bullet that
will cut their IT spend...

Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program website
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld