If programming languages were cars…

I’ve found this funny article by Mike Vanier.

This is an update to an old series of jokes about computer languages being like cars. I’ve added some more modern languages to the list. Any suggestions are welcome!

• Ada is a tank. A butt-ugly tank that never breaks down. People laugh uncontrollably if you tell them you drive Ada, but really, do you want to be driving a sports car in a war zone? [from Amit Dubey]
• Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it’s running, but if you’re careful it can go like a bat out of hell.[From “Subterfug” off digg.com:]Assembly Language: you are the car.

• Basic is a simple car useful for short drives to the local shops. Once popular with learner drivers, it has recently been stripped down to a shell and rebuilt by a major manufacturer, The new version has been refurbished for longer journeys, leaving only cosmetic similarities to the original model. [from Przemyslaw Wrzos]
• C is a racing car that goes incredibly fast but breaks down every fifty miles.
• Cobol is reputed to be a car, but no self-respecting driver will ever admit having driven one.
• C# is a competing model of family station wagons. Once you use this, you’re never allowed to use the competitors’ products again.
• C++ is a souped-up version of the C racing car with dozens of extra features that only breaks down every 250 miles, but when it does, nobody can figure out what went wrong.
• Eiffel is a car that includes a built-in driving instructor with a French accent. He will help you quickly identify and learn from your mistakes, but don’t you dare argue with him or he’ll insult you and throw you out of the car. [From Daniel Prager with some embellishments]
• Erlang is a fleet of cars that all cooperate to get you where you want to go. It takes practice to be able to drive with one foot in each of several cars, but once you learn how you can drive over terrain that would be very hard to navigate any other way. In addition, because you’re using so many cars, it doesn’t matter if a few of them break down.
• Forth is a car you build yourself from a kit. Your car doesn’t have to look or behave like anyone else’s car. However, a Forth car will only go backwards.[By “256byteram”, on a comment on Digg.com (I couldn’t resist):]FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN !
• Fortran is a pretty primitive car; it’ll go very quickly as long as you are only going along roads that are perfectly straight. It is believed that learning to drive a Fortran car makes it impossible to learn to drive any other model.
• Java is a family station wagon. It’s easy to drive, it’s not too fast, and you can’t hurt yourself.

Rest of the story here

By Mike Vanier ([email protected])

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