Yesterday, my friend Ali tweeted a lovely original limerick about Node.js and invited his followers to contribute more. Challenge accepted.

Ali’s tweet…

Here are my contributions, along with translations for non-programmers (TfNP):

There was a young man from Spain.
Java, he sought to explain.
But his students got stuck,
Asked him “what in the fuck,
is a public static void main()"?

TfNP: Java forces inscrutible syntax onto the most basic beginners.

Young Bjarne was not one to cuss
But one day he raised quite a fuss
Said he “I find it crass
That C has no class,
So I think I’ll invent C plus plus”

TfNP: Bjarne Stroustrup created C++ because it’s predecessor, C, lacked object oriented features, aka classes.

Mr. Eich, co-founder of Mozilla
Thought it would be quite a thrilla
If, in ten frantic days,
JavaScript could he raise,
The web’s six thousand pound gorilla

TfNP: In only ten days, Brendan Eich invented JavaScript, which became the de facto runtime engine in every web browser on Earth.

Mr. Pike had reached a plateau
Discovered Python was too slow
The powers that be
Told him no lunch is free
So he said “Then I’ll take mine to Go”

TfNP: Frustrated with Python build times for Google production services, Rob Pike invented the Go programming language.

There once was a guy named Ritchie
Who wanted to make programs easy
Said he “I am sad
Languages are so bad
But now I am able to C!”

TfNP: Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language to make it easier to write system programs. Unix, the precursor to Linux, was written in C by Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and a host of collaborators. Fifty years later, C is still one of the world’s most popular programming languages.

An arrogant techbro named Earl
Said “my code is a joy to unfurl”
But no one could say
If his claim was okay
Because he’d been coding in Perl

TfNP: Perl lives up to the moniker “code”. Alan Turing wouldn’t understand most Perl programs.

Mr. Wall said “my code makes me hurl,
So I’ll give code design a good whirl!”
He mixed up some piles
Of Scrabble game tiles
The result, as we know, is called Perl.

TfNP: Again, Perl is a write-only programming language.