Re: Different Strokes for Different Folks (Was: Assessing a language)

eifrig@beanworld.cs.jhu.edu (Jonathan Eifrig) writes:
> Surprisingly, there hasn't been much work in developing
> heterogenous programming environments, to support a sort of "mix and
> match" approach to programming. Such tools would go a long way to
> alleviating the language holy wars, I think.


Just a point of information, Jack -- there has been quite a lot of work
done on mixed language programming, also support for heterogenous
platforms. (Or perhaps we have different thresholds for achieving "lots",
so please don't take this as a flame.) Some folks down at U Arizona
produced a system for mixed language programming (called it MLP), written
up in TSE and saw some distribution; U Washington folks have a long
history of producing good work in the area, written up in several places
(though I don't know how wide is the availability of that work); and over
the years we have produced our own demonstration systems of how folks can
easily do mixed language programming on diverse platforms (based on the
"software bus" organization I cooked up back in the early 80's in a long
forgotten PhD thesis), also the subject of several journal papers. There
are others in the field too.


Now, it could be pointed out that some of the results have not had much
impact in state of the practice, and to a great extent that is true. When
I tell new users that they can write programs in multiple languages, and
hence feel free to "use the right tool for the job", then truly the most
common reaction I get is "but what do I want to say?" It takes some
education about the context of use for people to really get used to taking
advantage of these capabilities. But such systems are out there, freely
available, and with real users.


This is also the subject of much current funding/research, for example, we
have support from DARPA to continue our work on software bus formalisms
(in particular, showing how to interconnect truly funky languages, for
purposes of rapid prototyping) --- moreover, support for interconnection
technology is supposedly a key component in [ugh, forgive me for saying
such a terrible buzz word here] "megaprogramming".


Cheers,
Jim
--

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