Charlie Harvey

The foundational questions that inspire computer languages

I came across a very amusing image the other day, dealing with the questions that various popular programming languages seek to answer. There is a nice thread on reddit with some extra suggestions to include in the list too.

What if languages

Here is a transcription.

Python: What if everything was a dict?

Java: What if everything was an object?

JavaScript: What if everything was a dict and an object?

C: What if everything was a pointer?

APL: What if everything was an array?

Tcl: What if everything was a string?

Prolog: What if everything was a term?

LISP: What if everything was a pair?

Scheme: What if everything was a function?

Haskell: What if everything was a monad?

Assembly: What if everything was a register?

Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?

COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?

C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?

Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?

Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END

C++: What if we added everything to the language?

C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?

Rust: What if garbage collection didn't exist?

Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?

Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?

Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?

PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?

VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?

VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?

Forth: What if everything was a stack?

ColorForth: What if the stack was green?

PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?

XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?

Make: What if everything was a dependency?

m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?

Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?

Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?

Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?

Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?

Malbolge: What if there is no god?


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