@era: ahah, brilliant.

Python is just like a stripper or pornstar wannabe. At first glance she's bloody HOT and will dance our eyes out but after really getting to know her we learn that she only does missionary. She's stubborn and always does things the same way -- her way. Mysteriously some guys actually lose interest in other women after spending some quality time with her. Against all expectations her dialect (strings) and measures (numbers) are immutable. With the increasingly amount of satisfied customers she's gaining a lot of ground compared to other girls. Anyway is very easy to engage conversation with her and she does a hell of a good job.

Very Funny :-)

TCL woman was "initially born out of frustration", but eventually she gained extra skills, and became just like a silent killer, walking into the shadows. She has strong muscles under her soft skin and a shiny smile - she puts : "Hello World ! " quite often.
She can easily and dynamically overwrite and redefine rules, she can open every door/socket with efforts, who are lightweight as a feather, she has flexibility of a gymnastic player, and cooperation of a Red-Cross volunteer. She and her cousin, the TK guy, may have a lot of different faces; she and her little smart child, the Expect, can go anywhere and start a fire, or settle down a hurricane. She is real woman.

Another one I just came across: http://oldskool.wamma.fi/random/prog...ersonified.txt

Nice work guys! :-)

I dabbled with BASIC (Spectrum 16k, Apple IIe, BBC Micro and then QBasic) but didn't produce anything particularly useful. Learnt Pascal at school and then Modula-2 at Uni, again nothing useful. Then I found C and felt at home. I write stuff in a lot of languages now but from a distance it all looks like C code. I can write pretty good C in awk/perl/ksh/sh/bash, and funnily enough in C++. I can't write very good C in python or ruby, which is probably why I can't write anything much in them. I tried to write C in Java but it just kept trying to clean up my C so I fell out with it.

I use awk all the time (you may have guessed from my posts), and definitely think it qualifies as a language. awk is RAD personified. And it looks so much tidier than perl.

I also worked on Tandems for a while so know (S)COBOL and TACL, and I did a course in (p)TAL but didn't use it and can't remember it.

Most people don't notice awk woman, even though they see her very often. She spends most of her time serving tiny snacks that don't need much cooking, but every now and then she comes across an amazing recipe and turns out a delicious six course meal presented with a flourish, but strangely people forget and soon enough she's serving tiny snacks again.

Nice analogies

I started life in the wonderful world of BASIC (ZX-81 initially, then Apple II), then spent a few years wandering the desert - looking for a computer.
Did more basic work in BASIC on PET's and 8040's for a year - discovering that there's a limit to how much the average bear is willing to do with antiques...

I moved into Hypertext/AppleScript/macros/etc. for a few years - never quite finding the joy that programming should bring... It was always a struggle to find clean solutions to simple problems.

My next adventure was reading "almost" sql code on some old SunOS systems - back in the days of the pizza box! I got my feet wet reading c code, but didn't do any development of my own. Mostly cleaning up bourne scripts, etc.

Fast forward a few years (and a few hundred simple sh/bash/csh/ksh scripts), and I was introduced to Perl. My first thought was, "what a mess", but after a bit of mentoring by a co-worker, I was happy to say that I'd found my new religion.

I don't get an opportunity to do as much development work as I'd like, but it seems that I pull out perl to try to solve every problem that I encounter! I've been a UNIX analyst for a good many years now, but I never really used sed or awk beyond a very cursory requirement. Since joining this board, I've discovered that these two little tools are awfully darned handy, and could reduce some of my reliance on perl.

Not that I'll stop using perl - gosh no - but it never hurts to learn a little more!

Some other languages that I've picked up and then put down along the way include C, C++, Pascal, tcl, PHP, Python, Java/javascript