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Pseudo Code is Language Agnostic. – Mateen Ulhaq Apr 2 '11 at 9:13
up vote 31 down vote accepted







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Off-Topic: gnostic/agnostic refers knowledge. Atheist / theist refers to believing or affirming the existance. So technically you can have an agnostic religious believer or an agnostic atheist. But the explanation was very clear. You can also talk about a database agnostic system – Borjab Jan 20 at 11:28
@Borjab I am agnostic believer in Vim. But I use Emacs for practcal reasons. – Brandin Jan 20 at 13:58

Paradigms or features that aren't applied to only one language.

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When a solution is called "language-agnostic" you are literally saying that your solution "doesn't know about" languages, meaning its universal or independent from language specifics (paradigms, language idioms, etc).

For example, design patterns are language-agnostic, because the way they are described the specific implementation doesn't matter as long it sticks to the whole or a subset of the pattern ( some design patterns can be implemented without OOP).



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Agnostic means "don't know about", not "doesn't believe in". Subtle but important difference! – JacquesB Jun 10 '15 at 20:19
BPMN certainly is not language-agnostic, because it models processes. There are programming languages where you define merely the precondition and the desired result and the process unfolds implicitly, e.g. Prolog. Even Haskell and BPMN don't go together particularly well, because of Haskell's lazy evaluation strategy that causes things to not happen according to some imperatively defined order of things. – back2dos Jan 20 at 10:16


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There are a lot of ads asking for "language agnostic programmers". They're looking for people who are okay with programming in whatever language is needed to get the work done. They want people who are totally fine with learning another language if that's what the project calls for.

They're looking for people who aren't clinging to just one language and are unwilling to program in anything else. It's a way of avoiding people who say things like, "Ugh, you should change your whole system over to XYZ language! If you don't you're dumb!" A lot of people make those comments in response to those ads without realizing the massive expensive of rewriting a large system in another language. Could you eek out a 1% performance increase by swapping languages? Yeah, sure, but most of the time it doesn't make sense for a company to focus on that. It's not worth the money.

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