If programming languages were cars...
- Ada:
- An army green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes
and automatic transmission are all standard.
- Algol60:
- A Austin mini. Boy that's a small car.
- Algol68:
- An Austin Martin. An impressive car, but not just anyone can drive
it
- Apl:
- A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the
same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse gear and
is instrumented in Greek.
- Assembler:
- A formula I race car. Very fast to drive and expensive to maintain.
- Basic:
- A second hand rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery.
Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch the car as soon
as you can afford a new one.
- C:
- A black firebird, the all macho car, comes with optional seat belts
(lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).
- Cobol:
- A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.
- Forth:
- A go cart.
- Fortran II:
- A model T Ford. Once it was king of the road.
- Fortran IV:
- Model A Ford.
- Fortran 77:
- A six cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat
belts.
- Lisp:
- An electric car It's simple but slow, seat belts are not available.
- Logo:
- A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a
working horn.
- Maple/Macsyma:
- All terrain vehicles.
- ML:
- An old Volvo with two carburators. It starts but consumes a lot of
fuel.
- Modula II:
- A Volksvagon Rabbit with a trailer hitch.
- Pascal:
- A Volksvagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectuals.
- PL/1:
- A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two tone paint
job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in
the wind shield.
- Prolog/Lucid:
- Prototype concept-cars.
To shoot yourself in the foot using...
- Ada:
- If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States
Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing
squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."
- Algol:
- You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically
fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency
room.
- APL:
- You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't
remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
- Assembly:
- You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator
arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the
administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room
rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
- BASIC:
- Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until
entire lower body is waterlogged.
- C:
- You shoot yourself in the foot.
- C++:
- You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them
all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you
can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others
and saying, "that's me, over there."
- CLIPPER:
- You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that ou can
shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the bullet fits
has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_.
- COBOL:
- USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER
on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check
whether shoelace needs to be retied.
- DBase:
- You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the
time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway.
<rboatright>
- DBase IV version 1.0:
- You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly-designed
grenade and the whole building blows up.
- English:
- You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
- Forth:
- yourself foot shoot.
- FORTRAN:
- You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes,
then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you
continue anyway because you have no exception- processing ability.
- lisp:
- You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you
shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot
yourself in the appendage which holds...
- ML:
- Yoy create a list of feet, and with a recursive function you shoot
them all.
- Modula II:
- After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the
language, you shoot yourself in the head.
- PL/I:
- You consume all available system resources, including all the offline
bullets. The DataProcessing&Payroll Department doubles its size, triples
its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on
your foot.
- Prolog:
- You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing
to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in your face.
- scheme:
- You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which
you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you
shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot
yourself in the appendage which holds... ...but none of the other appendages
are aware of this happening.
- sh, csh, etc.:
- You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours
reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch
to C.
- Smalltalk:
- You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system
that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and
makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.
- SNOBOL:
- You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet.
The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into
yet another foot (a left foot).
- SQL:
- You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it
returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment at
the end of your leg.
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