Programming Language Halloween Costumes
Here are some tips on how to dress up as your favorite programming language for halloween.
C
Not much to this costume, basically just a thong and a bunch of pointer references that you malloc() houses into. You move from house to house on a very thin tightrope with no supports and no net. You do so very very quickly. If you fall off, you explode.
C++
Find some other costume you like and extend it. Redefine the “>=”, “>”, and “=” operators to act like “<”, to thwart all those stingy spinsters who refuse to give you more than one piece of candy. Walk the tightrope from house to house, almost as quickly as you would in a C costume, but explode just as loudly if you fall.
Perl
The Perl costume is pretty easy. Just tear apart of bunch of other costumes and sew their pieces into a new one, a sort of motley bastard costume that’s so chaotic and complicated and butt-ugly that only a very select few will be able to look at it for any length of time. Those select few will absolutely love you, though, and will give you twenty times more candy than they do the others, so it works out.
Java
The great thing about the Java costume is that it works at pretty much every household you visit. The bad thing is that you have to move about 100 times slower than the kids in the C costume, and pause often to garbage collect. Also, you can’t just accept() candy, you have to build a CandyAcceptor(), using the factory pattern, and then build a hierarchy of acceptors using the Command pattern, each of which is uniquely suited to the particular brand of candy you’re given.
Lisp
Get a bunch of friends to dress up as parentheses, and have them bracket you constantly as you move from house to house. Collect candy recursively, depth-first, by traversing all the way down to the last house then unwinding back up the stack to the first. Make sure the house with the best candy is the last branch node of your domicile tree.
Javascript
Everybody will hate you when you put this costume on, but they’ll give you candy because they think you’re their only option. However — you will be incapable of accepting this candy using the normal means (open bag, wait, close bag) because of some early design mistakes, but there will be literally thousands of ways to hack around this. For example, you could set fire to a house, and then lay a tripwire so that when its residents coming screaming out they’ll fall and the candy in their arms will go sailing through the air into a field of mousetraps you set a little bit down the road, which will go off and in the process hurl the candy into another high rainbow arc which will fall into a giant funnel that leads into a complicated series of roller coaster tunnels that propel that candy through the neighborhood and empty out into your bedroom window. This mechanism will seem very natural to you.
But it will only work with one house. You’ll need to find a different way to do it for each of the others.
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