> The philosophy behind this idea is in the widely held view that, while most languages are good for some things few, if any, are good at everything and instead

> The philosophy behind this idea is in the widely held view that, while most languages are good for some things few, if any, are good at everything and instead of trying to design new all embracing wonder-languages, it might be more productive to develop multilingual programming environments! This still sounds right to me. So far it's been a bit of a disaster everywhere I've tried it - the interface between languages is usually a mess and most developers have negative feelings about swapping back and forth between different languages within a single project (or a single source file). Text editors are a bit wtf about it too. I think there's something fundamentally right about the many languages on one VM approach of jvm/.net in terms of sane marshalling of information between languages. Writing one language in macros on a other makes it very hard to get sane compiler front end diagnostics to the programmer. I think there's something to implementing the languages as macros on the one true language substrate, and separately implementing compiler front end / linter things that tell people about problems in their code, though I really hated visual studio using inconsistent language front ends in the IDE and the compiler proper back around 2010. Interesting design space.