Presumably "ASF" doesn't mean anything to you. That's because this isn't an image macro, but rather a slide from an internal presentation that compared PayPal's Python API for a custom serialization format to PayPal's C++ API for the same.

Consequently it's important to keep in mind that advances in C++ aren't uniformly available and expertise in it is hard to acquire. That's why the image appears in a section describing the productivity wins available in Python. The point is that Python allows us to develop something that presents a clearer interface to a powerful and performant implementation, and allows our users to worry less about blowing their feet off.

For example, in the programming language shootout (http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/) the regex DNA test has a 5x lines of code difference between Python and C. That was code written by experts in each of the respective languages, and highly tuned for performance. About half the lines in the Python entry are just string constants that could easily be exported to a data file, which would give you almost exactly the 10x difference this slide represents.

Now, that doesn't mean it is always so, but it's totally reasonable to see that happen routinely.