Desmond File

Blog archive

If Programming Languages Were Religions

In the business of IT journalism, the car analogy has become so overused and impossibly tired that many shops I've worked in have banned the use of the comparison outright. Still, the old joke positing if Windows were a car is a classic.

So I got a chuckle when I read this bit on a blog site focused on a subtitle editing package called Aegisub. The entry offers a tongue-in-cheek comparison of programming languages to various world religions, as well as some fantastic suggestions for additional languages and religions. You can also find some great comments at Slashdot here.

Definitely worth a read. The author makes a great point comparing C and Judaism, both of which inspired major movements (Christianity, C++) that followed. But I laughed hardest at the description of Perl:

"Perl would be Voodoo -- an incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on Friday night."

Also worth noting is one poster comparing machine language to Animism ("ultimately, everything is made out of bits and on some level can be thought of as an executable") and assembly language to Shamanism ("we can use symbols to more easily communicate with the binary world").

Does your favorite (or most hated) programming language share characteristics with a world religion? E-mail me your takes at [email protected].

Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/18/2008


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

  • Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

    We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?

  • TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

    "TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube