ETOOMANY Languages – Coding in more than one (programming) language at once

With the proliferation of server-side languages and client-side toolkits, the question of who is talking to whom becomes a daily struggle for many coders. Formerly the server script simply told the client what to display whereas now the two engage in ongoing discussions. For the coder, this means that you end up needing to get Perl or PHP or Ruby talking to Dojo or Yui or Prototype. It's not just a question of rembering which syntax to use, it's a question of keeping in mind what each language's role is in relation to the other languages and mini-languages that are part of a given process.

A related issue is the cross-language app – the PHB asks you to turn Foo.pl into Foo.php. The Model and View are language-agnostic, “all” you have to do is translate the Controller. Just don't forget that Perl and PHP don't mind that comma at the end of an array, but JavaScript hates it.

This talk will focus on practical tips for taking the pain out of cross-language coding including helpful tools like Firebug and JSON and strategies such as consistent naming across languages. Who should come to the session? If your brain hurts when you read the following sentence, you may be suffering from ETOOMANY Languages: “I wrote the Perl that created the template that invoked the JavaScript that called the toolkit that manipulated the CSS that displayed the HTML that sent the form that Ajax built.”

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
BEGIN {*CORE::GLOBAL::flock = sub {die} };
open(I,'>test.pm') or die $!;
print I <<'EOS';
    package test;
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use constant HAS_FLOCK => eval { flock STDOUT, 0; 1 };
    print "no flock" unless HAS_FLOCK;
    1;
EOS
close I;
require "test.pm";

__END__
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