by Ryan McDermott

Programming Language Limericks

Lisp

There once was a time bygone,
Way back in computing’s dawn.
The language was Lisp,
Its functions were crisp,
But its parentheses went on and on and on.

C

There once was a language named C,
Made by Thompson and Ritchie.
But it didn’t take a smart aleck,
To screw up a malloc,
For everyone to segfault and flee.

C++

Then came a language after C,
That was supposed to set us all free.
Objects were the fuss,
For this language called C++.
But it was just a fancier way to crash your PC.

Perl

There once was a language named Perl,
That Larry Wall thought would take over the world.
But the syntax was homely,
And often write-only,
And reading your code would make you hurl.

Python

Python was a language for you and for me
It was simple and clean, but slow we agree.
But that was ok,
We loved it anyway.
Until it went from version 2 to version 3.

PHP

There once was a language without any direction,
It lacked thought, and planning, and any affection.
PHP was insane,
And to save you from your pain,
You would need morphine in your SQL injection.

Java

There once was a great reception,
When Java had its conception.
For many fell in love,
But none could rise above,
When they encountered a null pointer exception.

JavaScript

JavaScript was made for the masses,
It lacked types, and modules, and classes.
But it became quite the giant,
Because it ran on server and client,
Until it crashed both, despite 100 test passes.

Ruby

Then came the wind to our sails,
In a language that every hipster hails.
Its name was Ruby,
It made an expert from a newbie,
Until it got traffic and it fell off the rails.

Go

And when Ruby went over the hill,
Go came in for the kill.
It seemed so fast,
But oh at long last,
We all got tired of err != nil.