Martin Fowler's take on the state of play in software development tells me that a number of things we're ooking at in Cincom Smalltalk are dead on right now:

• Make it possible to ship Smalltalk as a DLL
• Make it possible to do "scripting" in Smalltalk

Take those capabilities, and ponder them with respect to this:

So are we returning to the language cacophony of the late 80's and early 90's? I think we will see multiple languages blathering away, but there will be an important difference. In the late 80's it was hard to get languages to inter-operate closely. These days there's a lot of attention to making environments that allow different language to co-exist closely. Scripting languages have traditionally had an intimate relationship with C. There's much effort to inter-operation on the JVM and CLR platforms. Too much has been invested in libraries for a language to ignore them.

So my sense is that we will see multiple languages used in projects with people choosing a language for what it can do in the same way that people choose frameworks now. I agree with Neal that we are entering a period of Polyglot Programming.

Interestingly enough, we talked about some of that stuff on today's podcast (which I'm still editing).

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