Hello Sailors !
I'm doing some research ... well, actually it's just a whimsy of mine
but I'd really like to know about this aspect of computer folklore.
I'm looking for short (two sentences max.), witty (you know, the
hackerish-type humor), clear definitions of your favorite programming
language, that can be understood by people not knowing about the language
itself (i.e. they should be in English, not in your favorite programming
language).
If you know one/some, please e-mail them to me. I'll post a summary
if there's interest.
--
/ Sami Nieminen --- May you live ---
// at --- in interesting times ---
/// Dept. of Electrical
/// Engineering
// University of Oulu,
/ I K Finland
From: Bernhard Muenzer
Subject: Re: Witty definition of your programming language
Date:
Message-ID: <2jvk21$m1l@cony.gsf.de>
In article <······················@ousrvr.oulu.fi>, ·······@stekt10.oulu.fi (Sami Nieminen) writes:
| Hello Sailors !
|
| I'm doing some research ... well, actually it's just a whimsy of mine
| but I'd really like to know about this aspect of computer folklore.
| I'm looking for short (two sentences max.), witty (you know, the
| hackerish-type humor), clear definitions of your favorite programming
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| language, that can be understood by people not knowing about the language
| itself (i.e. they should be in English, not in your favorite programming
| language).
If you want hackerish humour, you should ask for definitions of the _other_
languages, not one's favourite one :-)
I added a relevant newsgroup to the Followup line...
--
int m,u,e=0;float g,s,f;char*_="\n)······@eum(rezneuM drahnreB";main
(){for(;e<1863;putchar(_[++e>923&&e<952?60-m:u]))for(u=s=f=0;(m=e%81)
<80&&g*s+f*f<6&&++u<20;s=g){g=s*s-f*f-2+.035*m;f=2*s*f+e/81*.09-1;}}
There was an article many years ago that compared programming
languages to motor cars -- I have forgotten the referemce.
Dr Ken Thomas
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Southampton
S09 5NH
United Kingdom
Dave Brantley (·····@sol.aa.hcia.com) wrote:
: Myron A. Calhoun (···@cis.ksu.edu) wrote:
: : ·······@stekt10.oulu.fi (Sami Nieminen) writes:
: : ....
: : > I'm looking for short (two sentences max.), witty (you know, the
: : >hackerish-type humor), clear definitions of your favorite programming
: : >language, that can be understood by people not knowing about the language
: : >itself (i.e. they should be in English, not in your favorite programming
: : >language).
: : C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
Perl: no problem, you use your chain-saw to cut off both legs and seek more
interesting organs.
---------------------------------------
Ron Edgar <·····@wizard.weizmann.ac.il>
Dep. of Materials & Interfaces
The Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 76100 Israel
fax: 972-8-344138
---------------------------------------
Linux is a GNUine Perl
In article <······················@ousrvr.oulu.fi>, ·······@stekt10.oulu.fi
(Sami Nieminen) wrote:
> LISP -- Lots of Interspersed, Spurious Parentheses
I heard "Idiotic Silly" for the "IS".
All this reminds me - a few years back someone broke security on the Star
Wars development machines and found all the code was developed in LISP (Ada
was just a ploy to bankrupt the Soviet Union). To prove it, here are the
last 4 lines of the code:
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
--
Philip Machanick ······@concave.cs.wits.ac.za
Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
2050 Wits, South Africa
phone 27(11)716-3309 fax 27(11)339-7965
>In article <······················@ousrvr.oulu.fi>, ·······@stekt10.oulu.fi
>(Sami Nieminen) wrote:
>> LISP -- Lots of Interspersed, Spurious Parentheses
>I heard "Idiotic Silly" for the "IS".
My version is "Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses"
>All this reminds me - a few years back someone broke security on the Star
>Wars development machines and found all the code was developed in LISP (Ada
>was just a ploy to bankrupt the Soviet Union). To prove it, here are the
>last 4 lines of the code:
>))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
>))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
>))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
>))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Yeah. I've seen another version of the same program. The last line was ]
:-)
>--
>Philip Machanick ······@concave.cs.wits.ac.za
>Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
>2050 Wits, South Africa
>phone 27(11)716-3309 fax 27(11)339-7965
David
+---------------------------+----------------------------------+
| David Brabant, | E-MAIL : ·····@tintin.csl.sni.be |
| Siemens Nixdorf, | Phone : +32 41 201 609 |
| Centre Software de Liege, | FAX : +32 41 201 642 |
| 2, rue des Fories, +----------------------------------+
| 4020 Liege, Belgium. | #include "disclaim.hpp" |
+---------------------------+----------------------------------+
In article <···················@mackerel.cs.wits.ac.za>,
Philip Machanick <······@concave.cs.wits.ac.za> wrote:
>In article <······················@ousrvr.oulu.fi>, ·······@stekt10.oulu.fi
>(Sami Nieminen) wrote:
>
>> LISP -- Lots of Interspersed, Spurious Parentheses
>
>I heard "Idiotic Silly" for the "IS".
>
Shouldn't it be: `Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses' ?
Job Honig
Delft University of Technology
On Thu, 24 Feb 1994 10:06:31 GMT, Job Honig gave us:
\ >> LISP -- Lots of Interspersed, Spurious Parentheses
\ >I heard "Idiotic Silly" for the "IS".
\ Shouldn't it be: `Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses' ?
Whatever - there are at least as many versions of Lisp as there are of this
acronym, so it isn't as if there aren't enough to go around |:>
Xian
From: P. Srinivas
Subject: Re: Witty definition of your programming language
Date:
Message-ID: <2ll5tv$gk5@tribune.usask.ca>
Xian the Desk Lizard (············@bradford.ac.uk) wrote:
: On Thu, 24 Feb 1994 10:06:31 GMT, Job Honig gave us:
: \ >> LISP -- Lots of Interspersed, Spurious Parentheses
: \ >I heard "Idiotic Silly" for the "IS".
: \ Shouldn't it be: `Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses' ?
My definition of LISP is :
Lips(paranthesis) that are Inviting Sensual and Powerfull
_ - - -
-srini
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Srinivas Palthepu Email: ·····@cs.usask.ca
ARIES laboratory, Phones: (306) 966-8654 (lab)
Department of Computational Scineces, (306) 966-4759 (office)
University of Saskatchewan, (306) 373-9530 (home)
Saskatoon, Canada, S7N 0W0 Fax: (306) 966-4884
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You asked for humourous comments about programming languages; I was sure
I'd seen some somewhere. After a fish through some back issues of
_Connectivity_ (the UK IBM PC User Group's newsletter) I found what I was
looking for. (For the purposes of the copyright statement at the start of
the magazine, I think this newsgroup qualifies as a user group outside the
UK.)
This was a follow-up to an original article which I didn't find.
- - - - (cut here) - - -
Connectivity, December 1989. Page 26.
Selecting a Programming Language Made Easy:
Another View.
by Richard Larkin.
Inspired by the original article of Daniel Salomom & David Rosenblueth, of
the Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo,
Ontario, Canada, as Anglicized in the PC User journal in the UK.
The original compared various languages to vehicles. I have used two other
unlikely sources of comparison: furniture and buildings.
Assembler A pre-fab. (For those who are too young to remember,
'pre-fabs' were cheap and cheerful prefabricated houses
erected in UK immediately after the war, as a temporary
measure. Like most 'temporary' things, they lasted for
decades, rather than the planned couple of years.
FORTRAN II A two-bedroom terrace house.
FORTRAN IV A two-bedroom semi-detached house.
FORTRAN 77 A three-bedroom semi-detached house, with a granny flat.
FORTRAN 8X Peter Palumbo's design for the Poultry site in the
City of London.
COBOL A warehouse.
BASIC A first-time buyer Wates house. (For non-UK readers,
Messrs. Wates build very small houses, allegedly 'ideal for
first-time buyers', but incredibly difficult to sell on
at a reasonable profit.)
PL/1 A Jacobean mansion with everything, including rooms that
no-one has seen for years.
C A monks cell: spartan, only for the dedicated.
ALGOL 60 A bijou workman's cottage, tastefully converted and
modernised.
ALGOL 68 A geodesic dome: up to the minute, amazing, but not everyone
could live in one.
Pascal A small town house.
Modula 2 Another small town house, but with its own workshop and
toolshed.
LISP A bothy. Simple, plain and unstructured.
Forth A wigwam. Goes up fast, but is not permanent.
LOGO A three room Wendy house with front and back doors, and a
working doorbell.
ADA Cantonments. (?) (ie. barracks, etc.)
To add it to the original list, which was based on vehicles, may I suggest:
ADA a 5-ton amphibious truck with a winch, crane, bulldozer blade
and water-jet propulsion?
Or perhaps a CET: a Combat Engineer Tractor?
- - - - (cut here) - - -
No, I don't know where the furniture part went. Any ideas on Prolog? :)
tt
/====================================================================\
|| Thomas Thurman || Net: ·············@herts.ac.uk || cs1jd ||
||====================================================================||
|| QUOTE : "A man who was merely a man \|| IRC: usually "Marnanel" ||
|| and said the sort of things Jesus said \|==========================||
|| would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic- ||
|| on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or he would ||
|| be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man ||
|| was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or ||
|| something worse." - C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity". ||
\====================================================================/
From: William J Rehm
Subject: Re: Witty definition of your programming language
Date:
Message-ID: <15732@blue.cis.pitt.edu>
Onc 20 Feb 94 07:46:30 GMT, Tim Iverson wrote:
: True REAL(tm) programmers refuse to admit that DOS even exists. This credo
: roughly parallels the fervor in which a health-nut denies the existence of
: the sumptuous jelly donut ...
~~~~~~~~
APPLAUSE! Used DOS & "sumptuous" in the same paragraph! ROTFL!
With all these funny definitions of languages, I can't believe nobody posted
my favourite:
C++ : Where friends have access to your private members.
Regards,
Gavin
From: Pete Clinch
Subject: Re: Witty definition of your programming language
Date:
Message-ID: <2kl2h5$822@dux.dundee.ac.uk>
I used to have a sheet of spoof languages, one of which, SARTRE, has
appeared in this thread, but it left out the section about the conditionals,
which take the form IF (and nothing else, like parameters/arguments/
expressions) and the background process called the Nihiliator which sets
all instances of IF to equal NOT WHAT IF...
Can't remember all of the others, but there was C-, named after the grade
it was given when handed in as a grad project, Laidback, characterised
by friendly error messages like "Sorry man, I can't deal with that..."
and VALGOL, with strange errors like "Gag me with a spoon!", and also
LITHP, which is just like LISP but without an 's' in the character
set.
As for shooting yourself in the foot, you could try it in DOS batch file
code, but may have to resort to clipping your toenails instead... :-)
Pete.
--
Peter Clinch University of Dundee
voice 44 382 60111 x 2050 Department of Medical Physics
fax 44 382 640177 Ninewells Hospital
email ········@dux.dundee.ac.uk Dundee, DD1 9SY, Scotland, UK
In article <··········@dux.dundee.ac.uk> ········@dux.dundee.ac.uk (Pete Clinch) writes:
>
>As for shooting yourself in the foot, you could try it in DOS batch file
>code, but may have to resort to clipping your toenails instead... :-)
No, you really can shoot yourself in the foot, but first you have
to write the toenails out to a batch file which when called,
creates another batch file which repeatedly calls itself, each
time appending toenails to the first batch file in such a way
that when you then call the second batch file with the name of
the first batch file as its argument, a temporary gun is
constructed in a third batch file. This can then be run to shoot
yourself in the foot.
Marshall Abrams
--
Marshall Abrams ····@midway.uchicago
From: Rick Stanley
Subject: Re: Witty definition of your programming language
Date:
Message-ID: <2kqcmv$d46@cmcl2.NYU.EDU>
·······@spearmint (Domenico De Vitto) writes:
>······@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU (Gavin Russell Baker) writes:
>:
>: With all these funny definitions of languages, I can't believe nobody posted
>: my favourite:
>:
>: C++ : Where friends have access to your private members.
>:
>Hey, I'm a student and know this is wrong !!!
>Member of my class all have access to my private parts too :)
>Dom
Yes, you are right! It should read:
C++ : Only your members and your friends can touch your privates.
--
Rick Stanley | RSI
········@acf4.nyu.edu | (212) 569-9304
Information Technologies Institute | C++ & C Language
New York University NYC, NY USA | Programming, Training, Consulting
········@acf4.nyu.edu (Rick Stanley) writes:
> ·······@spearmint (Domenico De Vitto) writes:
>
> >······@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU (Gavin Russell Baker) writes:
> >:
> >: With all these funny definitions of languages, I can't believe nobody posted
> >: my favourite:
> >:
> >: C++ : Where friends have access to your private members.
> >:
>
> >Hey, I'm a student and know this is wrong !!!
>
> >Member of my class all have access to my private parts too :)
>
> >Dom
>
> Yes, you are right! It should read:
>
> C++ : Only your members and your friends can touch your privates.
Gee I'm confused....I thought I was reading comp.lang.pascal?!
Seems I got into alt.sex.deviat by accident! :)
Regards
___((|))___
Brev / \
((( --- --- )))
\\ -0-/ \-0- //
============================================== ~\ (. .) /~ =========
Brev AKA Neil Davies ( ///|\\\ )
Hyde Park, South Australia \ \___/ /
Internet: ····@cleese.apana.org.au \_____/
================================================== ((|||)) ===========
((|))
(|)
Big Cheesy Grin!!
······@aix00.csd.unsw.OZ.AU (Dr Henry Brancik) writes:
>PROLOG/LUCID - Prototype concept-cars.
I have heard for LUCID: "Stay where you are. Put the buildings on wheels
and move them to the people" (It's a dataflow language, which I know nothing
about).
As for Prolog, may I suggest the following:
It's your standard car, with a built in map-program to take you where your
going. Unfortunately, it gets there by driving up and down each street in
sequence until it gets a match to where you're going.
--
Paul Ward
"Belief is no substitute for arithmetic" -- Henry Spencer.
In article <······················@usage.csd.unsw.OZ.AU>, ······@aix00.csd.unsw.OZ.AU (Dr Henry Brancik) writes:
|>
|> Look what I found in my collection of humor etc.: (it is a photocopy of
|> page 6 of some book)
|>
|> Selecting a Programming Language Made Easy
|> Daniel Salomon & David Rosenblueth
|> Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
|> Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
It is from an ACM SIGPLAN Notices (SIGPLAN == "Special
Interest Group: Programming LANguages") from about 8
years ago. I had a copy posted on my Grad. Student
cubicle at Va. Tech (YIPES!! I JUST CONFESSED TO
ILLEGAL REPUBLICATION!!!). I can't remember which
edition. While it was there (1986-1987) several of us
made some additions, including:
Fortran 90 - A 5.0 litre Ford Mustang GT, with
turbocharger (array syntax) and
experimental air bags ([I forgot what
the air bags were - glover '94]).
Expect production delays while waiting
on foreign parts suppliers.
SmallTalk - A large lump of gray clay that can be
molded (with some effort) into the
semblance of any known vehicle. 0 to
60 in 8 seconds. (Oops! Marketing
misread the spec. That last digit
should be realigned horizontally.)
(For non-US readers "0 to 60 in 8 seconds" stands for
"0 miles-per-hour to 60 miles-per-hour in 8 seconds."
"0 to 60" is an acceleration benchmark useful only
for:
- drag racing
- getting onto the freeway at rush hour)
DISCLAIMER HAIKU: CRI may not/Share these opinions of mine/This is not my fault
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Glover XXXXXX\ \ / \ //XXX/ \ / \ X \ / \\\ X/////X /\\\\\
Cray Research / \ / \ / / \ / \ / \\/ / \ X \ / \ X\ \ X \
/ \ / \/ /\ / \ / \/\ /\ X \ / \ X \ \ X
///X// X\\\\\X ///X// X \ X X\\ / \ X//X/ \ X \\\\
/ \ X/////X / \/ X///X/X X \ / \ X \ \ X \
/ \ X X / \ / X \X X \ / \ X \\ X \
/ \ X X / \\\ / X X X////X/ //XXX// X/////X /XXXXX/
> (For non-US readers "0 to 60 in 8 seconds" stands for
> "0 miles-per-hour to 60 miles-per-hour in 8 seconds."
> "0 to 60" is an acceleration benchmark useful only
> for:
> - drag racing
> - getting onto the freeway at rush hour)
In Los Angeles, at rush hour, the only acceleration benchmark you need to
worry about is "0 to 5 in XX seconds". :-) :-)
Stephen