A coworker today said today that Larry Wall (the inventor of Perl) had been quoted as saying, in response to the question “Why are there so many ways of doing the same thing in Perl?”, “Good Weed.”

I wasn’t able to find any evidence of this (although I did turn up this great essay by Larry Wall on Perl and Postmodernism). This got me thinking though, if marijuana was the inspiration for Perl, what drugs might have inspired other programming languages?

Java, for example, was obviously inspired by caffeine, if not stronger stimulants. The sheer amount of energy required to do even simple tasks with Java attests to this, as well as the name (though to be fair, the original name “Oak” conjures images of gentle, overweight druids rather than wickedly-smart, annoyingly attractive twenty-somethings in 1999, fresh out of college, amped up on Starbucks, and ready to Change The World.

   She’s refactoring.

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So what about python? Another colleague suggested Absinthe, which most people who’ve actually tried it describe as “a more lucid and aware drunk”. I do tend to think of python as a more “laid back” language, with its weak (excuse me, “dynamic”) typing and lack of compilation concerns. Certainly Guido strikes me as a pretty mellow guy who probably enjoys a pint now and then. So maybe python is beer-inspired… after all, if you can solve your problem with 3-5 times less code than Java, that leaves a lot more time for drinking beer.

I’ll leave it to my readers (is anybody out there?) to suggest other language/drug connections. Time to sleep… perchance to dream.