This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Learning from the gamers Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Here's an interesting article on changes in the game (software) development sector - it seems that multi-language development is becoming the norm in that world:

With the recent advancements in processing power and computing capability on the desktop, it is now possible to execute the logic and "upper layers" of a complex application almost as fast in interpreted code as is possible in native languages. Some languages are better than others at various things, or for certain types of authors. Recently, a number of games have used "dirty Java" techniques that link Java to a native engine through JNI (Java Native Interface).1 Vampire: The Masquerade 14Redemption (Nihilistic Software, 2000) used JDK 1.1 as its scripting engine with great success.2, 3 Java also contains a wonderfully well-written networking API (application programming interface) for communication using TCP/IP: One possible use of "dirty Java" would be a multi-user game engine handling all of the net code through the Java language, but rendering graphics using native code. The bottleneck in this case is the network itself; using Java byte code is a trivial cost in terms of execution speed, but a huge savings in development time and ease of construction.

Smalltalk could play that kind of role in the business world easily enough - it's highly productive (more so than the mainstream choices) and covers all the bases in the network/interop arena quite nicely. So instead of using VB for an entire app, developers could do all the "eye candy" and reporting there, and build the back end in Smalltalk. Right now, business developers are still in the "one language for all" mindset. Maybe they need to look at what's going on in the game shops for a few minutes...