[sorbits]

Adding to that, his stated advantage of not having to limit yourself to one platform also seems opposite of my experience (i.e. keeping all on the same platform is an advantage).

When you have a big system with disjoint parts written in different languages, re-use and refactoring is a pain, and redundancy is almost certain to creep in (and with redundancy often comes inconsistency).

[meaty]

Yes heterogeneous systems are much easier to deal with, although from experience certain systems are a pig to deal with from end to end (anything Microsoft as a rule).

Different languages are just different forms of integration and the mantra of integration is hell should be in the forefront of everyone's mind, always.

[mairbek]

Depends on tools you use, I found Apache Thrift and Protobuf pretty to be sophisticated tools for integration between services.

[meaty]

Yet they are still entirely impractical for what we do. There is no one size fits all methodology which results in a heterogeneous communication layer. This means that you end up with technology fragmentation and therefore additional complexity.