Grok Programming

Martin Fowler on his bliki (part blog, part wiki) has a new entry about the ongoing debate about using Groovy or JRuby on the Java VM. I really don’t have a problem with anything he wrote there. I agree that both languages are interesting and worth developers getting to know and that Ruby probably has the edge on where things are going in the future. But one of the largest driving factors as to why a development team might choose either Groovy or JRuby wasn’t covered at all. So with apologies to both Martin Fowler and Ronald Reagan (not that I think he’s particularly upset with my hijacking of one of his more famous lines) I’d like to make my small addition.

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Neal Ford, the guy directly responsible for my career (yes, all legal claims need to go his direction), has on his Meme Agora blog, numerous conference keynotes, and various podcasts has pushed forth the idea of Polyglot Programming. The basic idea behind Polyglot Programming is that various aspects of a computer program could be written in multiple implementation languages that target a specific platform. More specifically think of all the computer languages that all run on top of Java’s VM and choosing a few from that set for your application and you’ve got the idea. You would choose what to use based on what language could most easily solve the problems related to a specific aspect of the application. For example, on a JEE web application you might write the view in Ruby on Rails running on JRuby, implement the controller layer in Groovy code in Spring, and use plain ole Java for the model because you have 90% of it already written for a previous application.

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