The Usefulness of Programming Languages Beyond Java

Abstract: Beyond Java, new programming languages running on the Java virtual machine (JVM) have been developed, such as Kotlin, Scala, JRuby and Clojure amongst others. Since all those languages compile to Java bytecode, they should theoretically be able to be used together in a project. This paper investigates if it is possible and what benefits it gives using those programming languages together in a project. The languages chosen to be used together were Jython, Scala and Kotlin. An experiment was conducted where in a single project, each programming language was assigned a problem to be solved. The experiment was then conducted in two iterations where in each iteration, the problems to be solved was assigned to a different programming language. From the experiment it was shown that using those languages together in a project was possible but resulted in some complications needed to be solved. It was also shown that the following division amongst the languages worked best in the present use case: Jython for graphical handling, Scala for calculating and computing and Kotlin for data-handling.