At work there are generally a small pile of languages in play: a "backend" language (Perl and Java seem common here,) sometimes a separate language for the web "front end," this has often been Ruby of late, a relational language (thus far always a SQL variant,) and the now ubiquitous Javascript.
I test big web apps, usually. When I'm doing automation, I'm often frustrated by a "language barrier." Sometimes I can get a lot of mileage out of a meta-object protocol in languages which have one. But as the application under test is regularly written in multiple languages, the places where different subcomponents connect are problematic, I lose this leverage here, because these languages don't share a MOP. In the future, I want to be able to have this cake and eat it too. I'm not sure what that looks like or even what to call it. Maybe it's a domain specific language for test automation, or perhaps more interestingly, a meta-meta-object protocol (TM!) I note that when my backend is written in Java, it still makes some sense to choose (of the "company approved languages") e.g. Ruby to do the automation. More and more I just wish they'd let me use Lisp. This is partly because I'm typically outnumbered by line developers by a wide margin and want all of the leverage I can get. I wonder what people here would think about these ideas. Alex Warth mentioned an "omnidebugger" and I almost wonder if whatever approach works for that might work for this. Maybe a common intermediate representation is all I need to do it. -- Casey Ransberger
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