Language-agnostic

Language-agnostic programming or scripting (also called language-neutral, language-independent, or cross-language) is a software development paradigm where a particular language is chosen because of its appropriateness for a particular task (taking into consideration all factors, including ecosystem, developer skill-sets, performance, etc.), and not purely because of the skill-set available within a development team.

For example, a language agnostic Java development team might choose to use Ruby or Perl for some development work, where Ruby or Perl would be more appropriate than Java.

"Cross-Language" in programming and scripting describes a program in which two or more languages must be implemented into the program code alongside the core programming language chosen to write the program. Whether this means including a script as a source, to be used when needed, running code within Language-Independent Virtual Machines such as JVM, or Object Models such as COM to cooperate with each other, or choosing languages that work well together natively.

Related terms

• Language-independent specification
• Cross-language information retrieval, referring to natural languages, not programming languages
• Language independent datatypes

See also

• Bilingual (disambiguation)
• Language-independent (disambiguation)
• Glue language
• Language binding
• Middleware
• Polyglot (computing)