A Guide To Programming Languages

The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you’re using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

C: You shoot yourself in the foot.

Assembler: 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.

APL: You hear a gunshot, and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell happened.

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.”

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.”

MODULA-2: After realizing that you can’t actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.

Pascal: Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type and won’t pass through the barrel. The gun explodes.

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.

Eiffel: You create a GUN object, two FOOT objects and a BULLET object. The GUN passes both the FOOT objects a reference to the BULLET. The FOOT objects increment their hole counts and forget about the BULLET. A little demon then drives a garbage truck over your feet and grabs the bullet (both of it) on the way.

Smalltalk: You send the message shoot to gun, with selectors bullet and myFoot. A window pops up saying Gunpowder doesNotUnderstand: spark. After several fruitless hours spent browsing the methods for Trigger, FiringPin and IdealGas, you take the easy way out and create ShotFoot, a subclass of Foot with an additional instance variable bullet hole.

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.

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.

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.

BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

PL/I: You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.

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).

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…

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.

English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.

POP11: Your boss has never heard of it and wants you to use one of C, C++, Lisp, or Prolog, so you push his foot onto the stack and shoot it.