If programming languages were spoken languages...

[Bregalad]

• Assembly would be your village's dialect. You speak it natively and it is the most efficient locally as long as you don't need to leave your village, however it becomes completely useless as soon as you want portability.
• ADA would be like Esperanto. Engineered from the ground up to be as universal as possible, and technically awesome, it is yet hardly used by anybody in practice.
• C would be latin. Old classic, is not particularly great by itself, but is so much used everywhere as a common denominator that it's impossible to get rid of it, and as such we cannot really dislike it
• C++ would be like english. Easy to learn, hard to master. Spoken poorly by everyone, but really loved by few. Is an ugly mess of all other languages. Is required for job applications.
• Java would be spanish. Not bad by itself for what it is and attractive at first glance, but too many people speaks it / learns it.
• Perl would be polish. It looks like a series of garbled signs at 1st glance, but for those who do the effort to get into the tick of it, it's nice, compact and powerful.
• Common LISP would be like japanese. Elgant, uses a weird word order, is spoken only by a niche although technically nice.
• Pascal would be like german. Elegant and very structured, but you always feel a bit unconfortable speaking it.
• After more tought, Java would be German. It's similar in structure, yet very different and much cleaner than C++ (English) and is full of compound words.

[Drew Sebastino]

Village dialect ftw!

[mikejmoffitt]

Java would be spanish. Not bad by itself for what it is and attractive at first glance, but too many people speaks it / learns it.

Not so sure on this one. I don't think this summarizes what people don't like about Java, and it approaches being offensive about Spanish-speaking communities.

[tepples]

I always thought the 125 words of Toki Pona would be assembly language. Or Scheme?

When I was in college, a student from Europe (arguelag) told me Basque was structured like object-oriented Forth.

[Drew Sebastino]

All those Spanish speakers need to stop polluting my Texas with their inferior language.

[nicklausw]

In my experience, Java is clunky and slow no one ever has the runtime when they need it.

Spanish is something that most people I know only speak through school, so the runtime thing makes sense to me due to living entirely around English speakers but the language itself is simpler than English (C++) and I don't really know if that makes sense or not. Also people speak it much faster than English which doesn't fit at all.

That explanation might seem weird, Java just doesn't seem to be matched right.

[Bregalad]

Ok, I admit the analogy between Java and Spanish sucks, but I could not come with anything better.

I do not know any spoken language that wastes GB of RAM for nothing, nor any language featuring TheStrangeAndSuperAnnoyingJavaCaseSystem.

[JRoatch]

I do not know any spoken language that wastes GB of RAM for nothing, nor any language featuring TheStrangeAndSuperAnnoyingJavaCaseSystem.

Legalese maybe?

[Bregalad]

I didn't even know about Lega people, but their language definitely isn't major enough to be compared to what Java is in programming languages.

[NovaSquirrel]

Legalese refers to really verbose, lawyer-style writing used in legal documents

[tepples]

If there's any natlang counterpart to Java's long compound class names, it has to be German.

[93143]

Legalese refers to really verbose, lawyer-style writing used in legal documents

It's also like Java in that it's not anyone's native language, but an artificial construct riding on top of a real language. Java doesn't compile to machine code, and it has to be run in a VM, which is presumably not written in Java.

...so what does this make Matlab?

[Bregalad]

If there's any natlang counterpart to Java's long compound class names, it has to be German.

Well, great analogy actually ! I also like how it is at the same time similar but yet very different to C++/English.

Some of those words are quite normal actually, but some are exaggerated and wouldn't be used in a real sentence. You typically don't compound more than 3 words. English can compound words as well, as a germanic language isn't it ?

It's also like Java in that it's not anyone's native language, but an artificial construct riding on top of a real language.

Yes, and unlike being an artificial language designed by a comitee, it was designed by a single person, just like Martin Luther designed the German language. The original language wasn't anyone's native language, but now I think it is the native language of many people everywhere where dialects were dropped, as well as for every family where parents origininated from different german-speaking regions.

[lidnariq]

I'd say that agglutination in modern English is so rare as to be irrelevant.

The modern examples I can think of are mostly coined business-speak and/or real estate promotions.

[nicklausw]

If there's any natlang counterpart to Java's long compound class names, it has to be German.

Das ist wahr, mein Schmetterling.