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Life in a Multilanguage World

As developers first come to understand the language-agnostic nature of .NET, numerous questions

arise. The most prevalent of these questions would have to be, “If all .NET languages compile down

to ‘managed code,’ why do we need more than one compiler?” There are a number of ways to

answer this question. First, we programmers are a very particular lot when it comes to our choice

of programming language (myself included). Some of us prefer languages full of semicolons and

curly brackets, with as few language keywords as possible. Others enjoy a language that offers more

“human-readable” syntactic tokens (such as Visual Basic). Still others may want to leverage their

mainframe skills while moving to the .NET platform (via COBOL .NET).

Now, be honest. If Microsoft were to build a single “official” .NET language that was derived

from the BASIC family of languages, can you really say all programmers would be happy with this

choice? Or, if the only “official” .NET language was based on Fortran syntax, imagine all the folks

out there who would ignore .NET altogether. Because the .NET runtime couldn’t care less which

language was used to build a block of managed code, .NET programmers can stay true to their

syntactic preferences, and share the compiled assemblies among teammates, departments, and

external organizations (regardless of which .NET language others choose to use).

Another excellent byproduct of integrating various .NET languages into a single unified soft-

ware solution is the simple fact that all programming languages have their own sets of strengths

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