Language As Food Metaphor

This page attempts to answer the question: if a ProgrammingLanguage were food, then what sort of food would it be? The question was posed by LasseHp at SyntacticSugar.

LispLanguage/SchemeLanguage: Nectar and ambrosia. Painful to mere mortals. Inspired the creation of lembas.

PerlLanguage: AlphabetSoup with dollars and hash signs included - if you look hard enough, you may be able to discern some meaningful structure to it.

VisualBasic: Fairy cake. Popular with kids, low nutritional content, contains a significant amount of air. Or maybe Cheez Wiz, good for gluing hard crackers together but you wouldn't want to eat it straight.

Visual Basic DotNet: Mille-feuilles cake. Like a cake as mentioned before, but with potential to become haute cuisine. Kids like it, older people like it too, good for all ages.

VisualBasicForApplications: Strong spices. Originally used to mask the sharp, acrid taste of MicrosoftOffice, nowadays used to accentuate the flavor of many, many other dishes, including SolidWorks? and CorelDraw.

AssemblyLanguage: Pure powdered protein mixed in tap water. It will make your code lean and fast, but it will also be a viscerally unpleasant experience. (Or alternatively, Icelandic hákarl: invented when nothing but sharks were available, and so thoroughly foul-smelling and horrific that eating it symbolizes manliness).

CeePlusPlus: Burger King Whopper. It seems like you're making a really awesome huge burger, but as soon as you pick it up everything flops out the other side.

DeeLanguage: Burger King Whopper Jr. Not as big and imposing as the whopper, but has all the same ingredients, actually stays together and is less likely to give you indigestion afterwards.

CeeLanguage: Fugu. Very tasty fish, but completely lethal if not prepared properly.

CeeLanguage (alternative): Mexican cuisine. Colorful, tasty and delicious, but if you're not careful it becomes so spicy it's unedible.

JavaLanguage (alternative): Tex-Mex food, a washed-up, lighter and softer version of Mexican cuisine. Those who felt the latter too spicy will definitely love this one. Real Mexicans, however, loathe it.

JavaLanguage: mass-produced franchise-chain coffee-flavoured milk drink style product loaded with syrups, sprinkles and who knows what else. There's a tasty stimulant hidden in amongst all the sickly-sweet distractions somewhere... Strangely, apple(t) syrup is one of the more popular additives. They advertise their WiFi HotSpot service at some of their branches. Those in the know go to a struggling independent Java purveyor for the gourmet blends. As food, coffee flavoured ice cream.

DalvikJava?: a shot of mass-produced espresso-flavored coffee product. Comes in a portable-sized cup with a chunky little droid on it and it's far more concentrated than your regular cup of coffee-flavored product. Tastes a little bit different depending on whether your coffee product machine was made by Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony Ericsson or Motorola. Their creators got into a scuffle with Oracle because their formula tastes almost exactly like Oracle's original coffee-like drink, only they developed it from scratch by googling a lot.

PythonLanguage: a cheesy comestible such as Red Leicester, Telsit, Caerphilly, Bel Paese, Red Windsor, Stilton, Gruyere, Emmental, Norwegian Jarlsberger, Liptauer, Lancashire, White Stilton, Danish Blue, Double Gloucester, Cheshire, Dorset Blue Vinney, Brie, Rocquefort, Pont-l'Eveque, Port Salut, Savoyard, Saint-Paulin, Carre-de-L'Est, Boursin, Bresse-Bleue, Perle de Champagne, Camembert, Gouda, Edam, Caithness, Smoked Austrian, Sage Derby, Wensleydale, Gorgonzola, Parmesan, Mozzarella, Pippo Creme, Danish Fimboe, Czechoslovakian Sheep's Milk Cheese, Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, Cheddar, Ilchester, or Limberger. Or perhaps two coconuts. Batter included... and a box of chocolates (Crunchy Frog, Ram's Bladder Cup, Anthrax Ripple, Cockroach Cluster, and Spring Surprise). ...and Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, and Spam.

PrologLanguage: pure chocolate.

RubyLanguage: Cheerios cereal - small, cheery, appropriate for beginners, old timers, all ages. (RubyOnRails would be the printing of the cereal box).

PhpLanguage: A hot dog with the works. At first it seems tasty, but then half way through you start to feel a bit queasy and realise it's mostly crap. Still, you crave one now and then and for certain occasions there's nothing quite like it.

PascalLanguage: An apple - the doctor says it is good for you.

ForthLanguage: shredded wheat, made of lots of crunchy threads. If you're not careful, they can get stuck in your teeth. (Or maybe a reverse Polish sausage...)

AplLanguage: Lucky Charms. Full of yummy mystic symbols. Just a little bit is very filling. Serves entire rows and columns of people at once.

AdaLanguage: K-rations.

SmalltalkLanguage: lembas, the elvish waybread. Delicious and compact, like edible poetry, it can keep you going for days in a pinch. Sadly, you don't often see elves in this age.

ObjectiveCee: what happens when mere mortals try to bake lembas. It looks fine, but smells fishy and the texture is all wrong. AppleComputer bakes it with cocoa chips and sells it in regular, tablet and bite size.

ObjectiveCaml: gourmet French cuisine. Not to everyone's taste.

LogoLanguage: a McDonalds happy meal, sure to please the kids. Comes with a plastic toy turtle!

ExBase: In Soviet Russia, food eats YOU !!

AliceLanguage: buttons and bran and treacle and ink ...and pickles (Sounds like Alice is pregnant!)

BourneShell / BourneAgainShell: A hefty, greasy stew, packed with all the energy you'll need for some hard work.

Windows PowerShell: Energy bars. Like a Bash stew, they give you energy for a day of hard work, but are more modern and fashionable.

StructuredQueryLanguage: Pasta. It comes in all different shapes and sizes, and a little goes a long way. You wouldn't want to eat it all on its own, but it's great under other things. Best eaten in restaurants, where it is served on tables. "I'll be your SQL Server today!''

JavaScript: Popcorn. Tasty and easy to make, but too much will give you a tummy ache. You almost never eat it outside of theatres. Doesn't taste quite the same between different chains of theatres. The theatres also have a Java espresso machine (apple(t) flavored only), a PHP hotdog stand, and they sell Cracker-Ajax and other Flash-y looking junk food.

MacromediaFlash: Greasy franchise fast food. Looks and tastes fine, but your digestive system really, really won't like it and in the long run it will make you bloated with fat. There is no small size: you can only order a super-sized serving that requires a table or a desktop to successfully eat it. Designers, artists and communication studies majors who have a habit of smoking marijuana before getting to work like to quell their munchies with it.

HtmlFive: A healthy, organic street stand sandwich packed with lots of fresh veggies. Still qualifies as fast food but it's much, much healthier, everybody can stomach it and you can comfortably carry it in your hand while walking in the street, and it looks just as fine as Flash-y junk food. The people who run the gig make their recipes entirely open, because their goal is not really to make business but instead to make these healthy sandwiches a new standard in fast food. SteveJobs loved them.

PickLanguage: Porridge. Highly nutritious, complete food, but you go nuts living on it.

DotNet: Energy drinks. Come in a variety of flavours... but they all seem to taste the same. Have just as much caffeine as Java coffee, but are more edgy and fashionable... and since they're in cans, they look like you can use your old vending-machines. But if your machine uses metric units, you'll have to make some modifications. Fortunately, most household and quite a bit of commercial machines use imperial units. Ultimately, they're just another modern fashionable way to get your caffeine.

CsharpLanguage: A sort of competitor to JavaLanguage. Made with fish instead of Java, so it's a sort of a sweet, caffeinated fish gruel. The caffeine really pulls on the nerds. A delegate of the company says, "At least, we think it was fish. It's whatever was in the DotNet that day." That's somewhat unfair (though a nice pun) and doesn't hit the point. I'd propose (due to the more advanced features): Made with ritalin instead of caffeine. Makes you think sharper, be more 'well-adjusted'; can also be abused as a drug. I'm not sure what's unfair about it. I work in it all day, and it tastes just as 'bleh' to me as I think I'm making it sound.

CobolLanguage: Instant microwaveable food. Heavily processed with lots of artificial ingredients, bad taste, bad nutritional content, and designed for brain-dead suits who can't cook at all.

AbapLanguage: Instant microwaveable Sauerkraut mit Bratwurst, still not the healthiest thing out there but far more palatable and nutritious than run-off-the-mill microwaveable food. You get it from German vending machines that manufacture the sauerkraut and the sausages from scratch and deliver it in an easily transportable package.

MatLab: Sushi. You must get used to the alien method of cooking sticky rice rolls stuffed with fish, but once you get used to it, it's very tasty and really nutritious. You can prepare it real fast once you get the hang of preparing entire rows of sliced rolls at once, but since the filling is usually raw, digesting it takes longer. It's more for refined scholars and academics than for tough, burly grunts who need the energy blast of .NET drinks, the carbohydrates of SQL pasta, or the strength of a Bash stew. (Or alternately, deep-fried food with lots of bacon and animal fats, the polar opposite of assembly code: it will make you heavy, pudgy and fat, but it tastes really good, though you don't usually eat it all the time).

VhdlLanguage: Molecular cuisine. Everything you do is at the lowest atomic level. Doing anything here is horribly difficult and requires thorough knowledge of chemistry and food engineering, but when you get a good dish, it's indeed one damn good dish.

GwBasic: Infant formula. Not nutritious for very long, and you have to drink it from a bottle with numbers on the side.

QBasic: Baby food. It's all mushy, so someone still has to teach you how to chew properly. The smell is surprisingly repulsive if you're not a baby, and the little glass jars have a tendency to shatter. Also limited to a small number of bites.

LolCode: Cat food. Though this doesn't means it hasn't been tasted by a daring human or two.

PerlSix: Alphabet soup made with those novelty shaped noodles in addition to the alphabets. The novelty noodles are shaped like words, so there really is a meaningful structure here. Also, it mixes in cheese, spam, cheerios, and a sweet caffeinated chicken mush which the manufacturers insist is made with parrot meat. Miraculously, it tastes much better than the original alphabet soup, and is much more nourishing than fish gruel or coffee or energy drink. However, it probably will make you lethargic and sleepy. Comes in many varieties, and the recipe is public-domain, so it's easy to make your own new flavor. Unfortunately, all of the factories are understaffed. Also, for at least one of the varieties, the first ingredient for a batch of PerlSix soup is "One can of PerlSix soup" (because PerlSix's parser is implemented in PerlSix, so you need a BootStrapping phase).

LuaLanguage: Tapas. You can't make a whole meal out of one, but put enough of them on the table, you won't care.

HaskellLanguage: A type of french soup, without a lot of the ucky bits like snails that most French cuisine has; unfortunately, it also contains very few ingredients which are remotely recognizable to the uninitiated. Those brave enough to taste will find that it has a pleasant texture and probably contains just a hint of ambrosia. or Dwarf bread--using it for rations has similar results to using lembas, but for completely opposite reasons.

Many entries have been added in the past and might be added in the future. You are invited to add your own entry now if you like.

See ExtraLegsOntoAdog for additional silliness.

CategoryMetaphor CategoryHumor CategoryFoodAndDrink