Use languages in which most characters don't matter
This is a generalization of Mama Fun Roll's point about BF. An esolang that ignores most characters is very useful in polyglots. Also useful: an esolang in which a large set of characters are interchangeable. Some examples:
- Whitespace ignores everything that isn't space, tab, or newline.
- Brain-Flak basically ignores everything besides
()[]{}<>. (@sometimes causes an error when the interpreter tries to parse it as the start of a debug flag.) - oOo CODE ignores everything except letters. Furthermore, all lowercase letters are interchangeable, as are all uppercase letters.
- Wierd only distinguishes between whitespace and non-whitespace characters.
- In Wordy, some punctuation characters are ignored, and all letters are interchangeable.
- Both Parenthetic and Parenthesis Hell ignore everything except parentheses.