I’ve been catching up on my reading, internet reading that is. And I notice that I had a lot of tabs open re: computer languages. One thing I notice that’s quite interesting is that a number of people are starting to make comments regarding various languages akin to my long-standing beliefs. Java: I’ve felt that Java is the new COBOL for a couple of reasons. O’Reilly’s State of Java describes one side of it. The other is the fact that Java is massively verbose. Writing something simple reminds me of writing something in COBOL. You spend an inordinate amount of time to even get the language to spit out “Hello World”. It’s sad. I love VM-based languages, I just think a C-like language is not the way to go. Perl: You can enjoy Working Daze’s cartoon (see below) to appreciate that I believe Perl is today’s APL. Cryptic and difficult to comprehend a short while later, but oh so powerful. I stay away from it. Lisp: I find Common Lisp too large and bulky. I prefer the elegance of Scheme, but Scheme lacks the rich libraries required for a fully useful language. It’s nearly 90% there, but that 10% —