Tour de Babel

A whirlwind verdict on seven languages — C, C++, Lisp, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python — written for the Amazon Developers Journal but too profane to print, so dropped into the blog instead. C is "a lightweight, expressive syntax for the von Neumann machine." Lisp gets the essay's most elegant sentence: if C is the closest language to modeling how computers work, Lisp is the closest to modeling how computation works. C++ is "the dumbest language on earth, in the very real sense of being the least sentient." Java is "simultaneously the best and the worst thing that has happened to computing in the past 10 years." Perl is the sperm whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan. Ruby is the $7,500 titanium mountain bike that's about to make Perl obsolete. Threaded through it is an affectionate history of early Amazon — Shel Kaphan, Greg Linden, Eric Benson — when the founding engineers allowed only C and Lisp into the source tree and everyone used Emacs, the 100-year editor. Mailman, the customer-service app written in Emacs Lisp, gets its eulogy here.

The voice everyone now knows arrives fully formed — profanity, bicycle and whale metaphors, real affection running underneath the abuse. As a scorecard the deep claims held up (C and Lisp as the two poles, languages reshape the people who think in them — the seed of Kingdom of Nouns and the cultural argument the rest of the archive runs on) while the horse race aged less well: Perl did fade, but it was Python, not Ruby, that went on to take the world.