Ways to do it According to the Programming Languages of the World [satire]

The Text

  • Perl - There’s more than one way to do it.

  • C++ - There are 5 ways to do it, 3 out of which are not supposed to work.

  • Visual Basic - The only way to do it is to use a third party component.

  • C - There is usually one way to do it, but there’s more than one way to optimise it.

  • Java - There’s barely one way to do it. (But as opposed to C++ it is guaranteed to work.)

  • Python - There’s only one way to do it. The one true way of doing it. And then there are others.

  • COBOL - The only way to do it is to use something else.

  • Common LISP - There is an infinite series of ways to do it, increasing in elegance, and decreasing in legibility.

  • Scheme - There are several ways to do it, but you have to chart all of them yourself.

  • Haskell - You can think of any number of ways to do it, but only one will have a reasonable time or space complexity.

  • Forth - There are several ways to write it, but no way to read it.

  • HTML - There are many ways to do it. Most of them should be avoided at all costs, and the other ones should better be generated with something else.

  • The C Preprocessor - There’s not supposed to be a way to do it.

  • Fortran - There isn’t a way to do it... oh wait! Now there is.

  • Bash - There are several ways to do it. Now one has to find a way to decide which way to do it.

  • C Shell - The only way to do it does not work.

  • zsh - There’s at least one way to do anything.

Copyright and Licence

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2002, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-by-sa) 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).

For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.

See Also