TMTOWTDI

[marcmagus]

"C gives you enough rope to hang yourself with, but warns you that you probably don't want to knot it that way. Perl gives you the rope, ties a noose in the end, blindfolds you, and stands you on a rickety chair."

"Don't forget, there's more than one way to do it in Perl. Perl also hands you a loaded gun, a bottle of pills and a glass of water, and does it all on a tall bridge. Oh, and a bottle of gasoline and a lit match. (thanks, captcha, 'burned', for reminding me of that one.)"

Comments thread on The Daily WTF

Comments

[oldsilenus.livejournal.com]

I love the strip you took your icon from. :)

[mneme]

*g*.

Though not so much, really -- perl gives you many objects that you can shoot yourself, hang yourself, etc with, and clearly labels them as such. C gives you rope, steel, and other useful tools -- but it's a bit less obvious that if you happen to tie a hangman's knot with the rope (or a slip knot), it will automatically wrap itself around your neck and start chocking you to death. Likewise, with the steel, if you happen to hammer it without paying too much attention, it will develop a sharp edge and start sawing away at the hand that hold it.

[marcmagus]

It lost the context of the original statement, where it might have actually been the case...

I'd actually be tempted to say that C not only gives you a rope long enough to hang yourself, but it gives it to you wrapped around your neck and then warns you to either remember to remove it from your neck or make sure you can be damn certain that the guy holding the other end of the rope won't pull it too far. (Buffer overflows, anybody?)

[mneme]

Heh. Yeah, that works. (I did follow the link). Buffer overflows, games with null pointers, uninitialized dirty variable, out of range access on pointers...

In the Good Old Days (before all major OSes had good memory protection), learning C would typically involve mistakes that caused funky issues -- like parts of your screen mysteriously flashing funny colors. By contrast, most of my worst "what was I thinking?" mistakes in perl involve out of control forks that fork/wait so fast that process killers cannot keep up with them, and the machine eventually has to be rebooted.