0740-7459/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE September/October 2010 IEEE SOFTWARE 61 focus Dean Wampler and Tony Clark: One criticism of MPP is that the average development team can’t handle more than one “thing” at a time. Is that true? If so, should we give up the idea of MPP? Or are there mitigation strategies worth pursuing? As trends seem to be moving in this direction, if development teams cannot handle MPP, then will they be relegated to using “second class” develop- ment processes? Will this put these organizations at a serious disadvantage? Neal Ford: Yes! But this question seems to pose it as a binary proposition. Most teams are by necessity MPP teams now. No one writes in a single language anymore. Even trivial applica- tions have a general-purpose language, SQL, Ja- vaScript, CSS, and dozens of frameworks, each of which includes an external DSL (usually in XML) that is its own mini language (the syntax is XML, but the XMLSchema defnes the se- mantics). For a long time, teams that refused to use SQL (preferring instead some sort of fat fle “database” tuned to a particular 4GL language) or that refused to use Ajax would be considered behind the mainstream. Increasingly, teams that ignore MPP will fnd themselves falling behind their competitors. MPP is really just a realization that we’ve been U sing multiparadigm programming (MPP) has costs as well as benefts. Over email, guest editors Dean Wampler and Tony Clark discussed with Neal Ford and Brian Goetz the practical issues for MPP in industrial soft- ware development teams. What follows is a transcript. Dean Wampler, DRW Holdings Tony Clark, Middlesex University Neal Ford, ThoughtWorks Brian Goetz, Oracle Multiparadigm Programming in Industry: A Discussion with Neal Ford and Brian Goetz multiparadigm programming