nerd post: languages in a dorm

i was chatting with a friend today who’s not a programmer and at some point we started talking about work and she started asking about different programming languages that i know and how theyre different. i tried to explain the diff between PHP, Perl and Python which can ultimately all do the same thing. so to help understanding, i made them people in a dorm.

from the chat:

perl is great that there are like 67123718931289031 ways to do something but its also bad for the very same reason

python is a pretty neat language.its a very very structured language
like… if you dont indent your code in python, it will hate you

if python perl and php shared a townhouse, perl would make the mess. php would stay in his room and python would be the ocd-cleaning-crazy one.

and because she’s columbia, we all know townhouses have 6 people so she asked me to add three more, just for fun.

you’d have C, and he would be the older wiser guy who does things in old-fashioned ways. they work, but theyre slow. it’s like… watching someone use a mouse to click the “copy” and “paste” buttons instead of CTRL-C and CTRL-V. but everyone knows C has wisdom and experience so they learn from him.

then there’s Java
Java is the guy who tries to be cool
and he makes it for a little while
but in the end, no one thinks he’s that interesting anymore and he’s just normal.

last “language” i’ll add in is HTML
he’s the nice guy
gets along w/ everybody
even those that don’t treat him that well
but some people treat him well and mr HTML really shines
sometimes they don’t and he just seems mediocre
he’s easy to get along with

this was fun. i’m a nerd.