If programming languages were religions.
By this list, my current job has me doing Voodoo and Satanism… :eek:
Anyone want to add some languages to this list? I’d especially like it if someone came up for something for IDL that I could use to tease Mr. Neville about.
Perl is incomprehensible? When I took Programming for Linguistics, we trained in Perl precisely because it was easy to understand and worked well with regex.
Once upon a time they invented an incredibly powerful computer, many orders of magnitude better than anything that had gone before. They turned it on, and asked it whether it would be possible for it to tell them the meaning of existence.
It got kinda warm for the longest time, and then came back with its reply. “Yes, I can explain the meaning of existence, though it will be very difficult. In fact it will be quite an effort. And I will have to invent Mathematica first.”
BASIC would Zoroastrianism, an extinct language that is the basis of many that followed.
I agree on your definition better than the link’s, Ataraxy. I’m a Satanist and I know how to use BASIC, and I can’t see any conceivable connection between the two.
It’s Visual Basic, not BASIC, that is Satanism. They’re not the same thing.
A co-worker says that Perl is a “write-only” language. Heh.
Perl isn’t incomprehensible, it’s just really hard to know thoroughly.
Perl really is a radical design by Larry Wall - who not incidentally is a linguist - as a compromise between traditional “C-like” programming languages and natural language. The end result (and I say this as someone who’s used perl for years, knows prettly much all of the ins and outs - and actually likes it) is a language that initially gives you a false sense of knowing what’s going on and then forces you to accept all kinds rigid but really quite hidden rules in order to build anything solid. It’s fine if you’re in a multi-year program to get to know the language, but it will probably suck if you’re using it to build a big system from scratch unless you’ve already messed with it for a couple of years.
as for the “write only language” comment - perl gives you quite a lot of freedom - more than most other languages. you can use it to make yourself perfectly clear, or you can make yourself incomprehensible. Just like natural languages do.
Hah! I’d be a D programmer if I could.
Okay… so why is Visual Basic like Satanism?
It’s certainly driving me insane. In the New Testament, demons did that to people.
It’s also owned by a company that many people see as evil and trying to take over the world.
This reminds me of Umberto Eco’s 1994 analysis ofthe religion of PCs and Macs.
I’d argue that IDL was Satanism, but you do have to sell your soul… 
That would make some sense- he does everything in IDL, and won’t consider that any other language might be better for some tasks…
sub foo {for(@_){print
chr
((my $e
= $_)
->[0]
);
for(1,2)
{ foo(
$e->[$_]) if $e->[$_];
} } } foo( [73, [84,
[39]], [83,
[32 ], [84,
[65 , [75,
[ 73 , [78,
[ 71 ] ],[32]]
] , [76,
[79, [ 78,[71,
[69 , [82]]]],
[32 , [84,[
72 , [65,
[78] ] ] ]
] ] , [32,
[87, [69, [32, [84] ] ]
], [72, [79, [85, [71, [72,
[84] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]);
Sounds like quite a lot of astronomers I know… Its a cult!
INTERCAL <-> Snake Handling
And G would be… what?
Actually, I know a couple of Zoroastrians.
Maybe IDL could be the Moonies?
d&r