Tag Archives: Linkdump

[Linkdump II] German language & Programming Language jokes

This linkdump does not really have any predominant topic but it consists mostly of stuff that I came across in the past few days, that I felt I should share. Most of it does not really fit into any particular category, but I am gonna go ahead and share it anyway: First a few links that you should skip if you don’t speak German because they are entirely about this language.

  • A video tutorial [~1:30h] about gender in German (der/die/das) that is really quite interesting. The author attempts to construct a gender machine that explains why certain nouns have a certain grammatical gender. [German only]
  • While we’re on the topic of language, there is really good blog that deals with neologisms and the way language is used to manipulate thought. The authors that are all affiliated with the Chaos Computer Club also do a podcast from time to time, that can be found on the same site. They are quite frequent speakers at the Chaos Communication Congress as well, for example Martin Haase with an in-depth analysis [~1h] of the digital agenda of the German Government. [German only]

Welcome back,  dear English speaker ! After I shared some links on programming language design last week, here some more links that poke fun at specific programming languages as well but are not necessarily about language design so they didn’t fit with the stuff in the last linkdump:

  • I came across a hilarious blog posting that is actually a few years old, that attempts to reconstruct the history of programming languages. It It is fittingly titled A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.  It is full of gems such as:

    In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP […] remains an influential language in “key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension”

  • Originally, I wanted to link to an old posting from a newsgroup here, that is titled Programming Languages Are Like Women. But upon rereading it, I felt it was sexist, so maybe I should include a short disclaimer. Which got me thinking if it really was a good idea to link to it in the first place. So I found a similar article comparing programming languages to weapons, that is even funnier and avoids insulting anyone except maybe some language evangelists.

[Linkdump I] “The worst programming language ever” and more

A class on Programming Languages at TUM (video lectures) taught by Dr. Petter and Dr. Simon got me really interested into language design over the past semester.

While I learned a ton of stuff and for example got some really interesting insights into the decisions involved when comparing Java and C# and reading  Anders Hejlsberg’s reasons for designing C# the way it is (e.g. why methods are not implicitly virtual in C# etc.), what I am going to share here are links that show language design at its worst.

First of all, there is Mark Rendle’s presentation on The Worst Programming Language [~ 1h]  in which he sets out to develop the worst programming language ever. He draws inspiration from real programming languages as well as from other satirical languages such as INTERCAL, where he borrows the COME FROM.

Another talk that is really hilarious is Gary Bernhardt’s classic sarcastic Wat talk [< 5 min] on strange behavior in JavaScript and Ruby. I guess most of you have already seen this one like a thousand times, if not, you have been missing out !

There is also a blog article called PHP : a fractal of bad design that someone posted on reddit a few months back that has to be taken with a rather large grain of salt but does a good job at showcasing design choices in PHP, that –  looking back – seem to have been not too smart, and is hilariously funny while doing it. There is also PHPsadness.com and /r/lolphp that are kind of similar. Did you know that – in PHP – if you have a :: where it is not supposed to be, PHP < 5.4 complains it found an unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM (Hebrew for double colon) ? If not, these are the places to find out. (I really recommend checking out the graph for the less than relation in PHP, it’s nothing like you expect.)

These are just the links I remember off the top of my head, I plan on sharing more of those in the future, as well as some links on language design that are not tongue-in-cheek.