If Programming Languages Were Vehicles
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C would be a motorcycle. Popular with tinkerers and performance enthusiasts - who will tell you
that it is only dangerous if you don’t take the proper safety precautions, often while nursing
a fresh injury.
| PHP was your first car. It was really easy to get started with, and it was a great way to
get around. It had some … idiosyncrasies that made it a pain in the ass, sometimes,
but you still remember it fondly. “The ashtray smells like cheese.” “Yeah, it just does
that sometimes.”
| C++ is the same motorcycle from before, but with a fridge strapped to the top. You can
do anything you want, with fridgebike. It has every feature you will ever need - and
so easy to use! Fridgebike. Shh… fridgebike.
Haskell is an electric car. Everybody agrees that it is the technology of the future,
and yet, 20 years later, adoption is still niche. Proponents insist that it is
practical and easy to use, but it still has a perhaps-deserved reputation of being
a monumental pain in the ass.
| O’Caml is a solar car. Only ever seen in R&D departments and university campuses;
doesn’t work when it’s raining outside.
| Toyota knew that the trick to getting people to accept a new technology was to
anchor it to something old, reliable, popular, and awful, so the prius contained
an internal combustion engine. Scala.
Mumps is a 1966 Datsun Sunny. You’ve never heard of it, it’s half a century old, and if you hunt around, you
can still find people who depend on it. Sad, confused people.
| Nobody really likes Javascript, but a lot of people use it anyways because it’s everywhere and they don’t
have any other options. It’s a bus.
| Lisp isn’t a car. It’s the idea of a car. No, a collection of ideas.
A toolkit that you can use to imagineer a car of your very own! A mental framework.
It is popular with people who think that they are very good at designing their own vehicles
Assembly is still the only option in some environments. It’s also popular with some hobbyists for the romance and difficulty of it. Horse.
| C# is like a really nice car that’s tied to an enormous, unwieldy anchor.
| Walt shakes Cube Drone awake Walt: Wake up, you fell asleep watching conference videos again.
| Cube Drone obviously groggy: Perl is like getting hit by a truck.
