If programming languages could speak...

Posted by Mark at April 16, 2005 09:37 PM

Burningbird » The Parable of the Languages

A hilarious and strangely believable story by Shelley Powers, about a gathering of programming languages. My favorite is C, "a rude language and hard to live with". Back when my day job used C for software development, I wrote up a test to give to prospective programmers to see if they actually knew C or just memorized parts of it. The last question was:

char c = "abcdef"[2];

What value is stored in c?

C let you do things like that. Rude, yes, but the language gave you these sublime moments, like alchemy. A glimpse into the heart of the machine.

 



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