1. JavaScript: Everything Eventually Converges to JS#

Atwood’s Law says: “Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be rewritten in JavaScript.” This was originally a quip by Jeff Atwood in 2007, but now it has become a prophecy—Electron on desktop, React Native on mobile, Node.js on the backend, and even microcontrollers can run JS.

Hence the classic joke: Why are there more and more frontend engineers now? Because backend, client-side, and operations all eventually became frontend.

2. Java: Verbosity Is a Corporate Culture#

The thing Java gets roasted for the hardest is being verbose. A program that prints Hello takes one line elsewhere, but in Java you first have to create a class:

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public class HelloWorld {
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    public static void main(String[] args) {
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        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
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    }
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}

Pair that with “enterprise-grade” naming like AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean, and joke writers conclude: Java programmers are not writing code, they are writing legal documents.

3. C++: An Octopus with Legs Nailed onto a Dog#

C++ has a famous self-deprecating description: it is “an octopus with too many legs nailed onto a dog”—C compatibility, object orientation, templates, STL, RAII… it wants everything, and as a result everything is complex. Developers joke that C++‘s design goal is “to make everything simple difficult, and to make everything difficult possible.”

4. Python: Indentation Is Justice#

Python fans mock others for having to write a bunch of curly braces, while Python only needs indentation; others retort that Python “uses whitespace as syntax,” and if you copy and paste code, the indentation gets completely messed up. Neither side can convince the other, so they can only keep writing their respective print("hello").

5. A Joke That Actually Runs#

There is also a meme in programmer circles about “not being able to tell Halloween and Christmas apart,” and its brilliance lies in the fact that it actually runs:

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# Halloween is October 31, Christmas is December 25
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print(0o31 == 25)  # True! Octal 31 is exactly equal to decimal 25

Octal 0o31 is decimal 25, so “Oct 31 == Dec 25”—Halloween (October 31) and Christmas (December 25) are the same number in programmers’ eyes. This meme has been made into versions in various languages and has become an evergreen in the history of language roasting.

6. After the Laughter#

The reason these jokes are funny is that they precisely hit the real pain points of each language. But from another angle, every language was born to solve a specific problem: JS’s flexibility let it dominate browsers, Java’s rigor let it support banking systems, and C++‘s performance is still irreplaceable today.

Languages are just tools, roasting each other is fun, but real engineers choose tools according to the scenario—after all, if the code is badly written, the language is not to blame.

References#

• The Principle of Least Power (source of Atwood’s Law)
• xkcd 297: Real Programmers