I feel strangely peaceful.

And a little perverse.

* Syntax is an illusion, created by our own subjective definitions of words.

* All suffering (stack management trouble) is caused by the desire for and attachment to the worldly concept of variables.

"I have never written more than 10 lines of code in any language."

Concise is clear and short, terse is less characters but unreadable.

That makes me think of the jews who live in Saudi Arabia and know enough of the Coran to pass as muslims.

Java would be islam then. No wonder it sounds indonesian.

Aka it's Quantum Mechanics ;)

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/15/today-on-offworld-13.ht...

Dim! Yuck.

It looks at first like Christianity or Judaism, but it somehow brings in funky zen concepts like lambdas and prototype chains. No one really took it seriously, then one day, it was just everywhere. No two implementations are quite the same, and most people do it horribly.

1. Everyone knows it a little, but few actually use it for much, and hardly anyone really understands it.

2. A lot of the ideas came out of old tribal warfare, and was only standardized relatively recently.

3. People who do it full time are WAY overpaid. ;)

My guess is that JavaScript is Zensunni: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zensunni#Zensunni.

Is that really true? I've never heard anything like that about Ruby. It does, however, sound very much like PHP. From the PHP FAQs:

"Much of [PHP's] syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in."

So if Ruby had:

    * The clarity of Python
    * As well as the batteries-includedness of Python
    * With the flexibility of Perl
    * As well as a library managed as well as CPAN
    * With the tooling of Smalltalk
    * But without the weird VM business

No mention on your other points here because I either agree or don't have an experienced opinion on the matter.

http://jes.com/gfx/people/csn_1983_11_28_antigrav_dick_001.j...

(Sure don't mean to offend anyone, just a silly hacker joke.)

  int a; //This is a number
  char b; //This is a char.
  void * c; //This is a pointer.
  x=*((int*)a); //This is a void pointer cast to a number.

Sheesh!

I'm not sure you and I are working with the same definition of irony here. You don't like Perl, that we understand. But if you can honestly say you believe that Perl is not among the most productive, if not the most productive, glue languages for use in UNIX system administration tasks...then, well, I don't know what to say. One can't really have a rational discussion with someone who is that far off the map.

But nothing was enough to convince to change. Until this. Fundamentalist Christianity. Well, goddamn.

How can I distribute desktop apps in Lisp? :)

I do not get it. Haskell is very similar to other languages, take Clean for example.

ask Dante Alighieri...

And obviously you all have not been blessed by his noodly appendages, but I shall not go and spread our sacred gospel, he shall come and touch you with his noodliness and you shall instantly convert.

And here I would consider PHP the defintion of going to hell :)

Bit of a tangent, but I never understand why people say this. Don't they know that humor is one of the most potent weapons? If someone is offended, will they be less offended that they are regarded as laughable?

(Tangent to the tangent - this reminds me a little of Jon Stewart hiding behind "But I'm only a comedian" every time someone wants to talk about the politics in his satire. I happen to like his satire a lot and have no particular objection to his politics, but this is just disingenuous.)