Zac Bowling’s Blog

One thing I find myself doing recently is choosing languages when it comes to different projects on the CLI. For stuff I distribute or might be seen by other developers, I lean towards C#, but for my own projects the decision can vary.

There a lot of chooses that all compile to the CLI. All of them doing something a bit different then the rest but really not all that different in overall abilities and structure and everything integrates so well because its all the same class libraries and runtime. I really doesn’t matter if its be Boo, VB.NET, C#, Nemerle, Delphi.NET, JScript, J#, IVKM converted Java, (dare I say) Managed C++, IronPython, IronPHP, PHP4Mono, IL (yes even plain IL is nice), and so many more (see http://dotnetpowered.com/).

A lot of this is elementary to most of us on how you can intermix langauges on the CLI but its hard to find a practical reason for mixing of languages in a single project. I’ve been doing just that.

I love using boo for all my testing, its takes less typing and isn’t so strict. Its also so easy to change quickly to test everything in just a little different way. It can get a bit confusing on some stuff but its entire design is premo for getting it done quickly and making it work (as the slug on the site says: “a wrist friendly language for the CLI”). It’s so nice having a language that compiles and runs in a single command because I can script that into my test scripts.

I still believe in writing all my backends in C# of course for all my interfacing and business logic, however for my data layers, lately I’ve been using Nemerle because of the great runtime macro abilities. and its cut and dry abilities for handling collections and arrays.

For the GUI side, depending on the project, I’ve been working on using PHP4Mono and interoping into other languages with SOAP like ColdFusion and Java using JSP and just plain C# or VB (depending on who is going to work on it after me).

I’ve only gone over a few of the languages I use but really before I do anything, I always evaluate the options and the best languages. Sometimes I choose to use something like Python, Perl, Java, PHP (traditional) and even C or C++, but the CLI offers a new level of integration options that really rocks when you are like me and have more then one favorite language.

Resources:

• http://boo.codehaus.org/ - Boo
• http://www.nemerle.org/ - Nemerle
• http://php4mono.sourceforge.net/ - PHP4Mono