[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.