Is one language and one modularity "paradigm" right for your entire application? This talk argues that modern applications are easier to implement and evolve when they combine appropriately-chosen programming languages and paradigms.

Emacs demonstrates the use of multiple languages. Most features are written in a scripting language (Emacs Lisp) that runs on a C-based kernel. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are also used in this way.

While object-oriented programming is great for modeling domain concepts, functional programming improves robustness, especially for concurrent applications, and aspect-oriented programming addresses "cross-cutting concerns".

Dean Wampler, Ph.D., is the co-author of "Programming Scala" (O'Reilly) and a software developer for DRW Holdings in Chicago. He writes about Polyglot Programming at polyglotprogramming.com and he speaks at conferences on this topic. This interest lead to the forthcoming special issue of IEEE Software on "Multiparadigm Programming" (Sept-Oct 2010), for which he is a guest editor. He is also the founder of the Chicago-Area Scala Enthusiasts. He created two open-source projects, Aquarium, an AOP library for Ruby, and Contract4J, a Design-by-Contract library for Java.