Is It All C? (Always Has Been)

The programming language family portrait is absolute gold! C is clearly the dignified patriarch, while his rebellious son JavaScript is going through that punk phase we all pretend never happened. Meanwhile, C# is the well-behaved child who still gets good grades despite being raised by Microsoft. Java sits there looking completely normal and mainstream (just like its enterprise usage), while PHP awkwardly exists as the kid nobody talks about at family reunions. Objective-C is that cousin who's slowly being forgotten since Swift came along, and Lisp is just happy to be included despite being ancient. The best part? They're all dysfunctional yet somehow related—just like actual programming language inheritance!

Oh look, another Rust evangelist has cornered you at the water cooler. The number "18464028364921" isn't random—it's approximately how many times you've heard someone preach about Rust's memory safety while you're just trying to write your C++ in peace. That gun-to-head feeling is the exact sensation when someone starts their fifth lecture about how Rust prevents null pointer dereferences while you're mentally calculating how much time you've wasted listening instead of shipping code. Sure, memory safety is nice, but so is being left alone with your segmentation faults and pointer arithmetic.

Saved $50,000 in student loans with this one weird trick. CS professors hate it. The meme explains OOP concepts better than most textbooks: Encapsulation: Veggies with privacy levels labeled. Private parts stay hidden, public interfaces say hello. Just like your code should work. Polymorphism: Spider-Men pointing at each other. Same interface, different implementations. The perfect metaphor doesn't exi— Inheritance: Father and son. Kid inherits dad's traits and probably his debugging skills too. Abstraction: Half a person behind a pole. You don't need to see the whole implementation, just the interface. Like most APIs we pretend to understand.

Ah, the transformation that C++ brings to a programmer's soul. While other substances merely alter your appearance, C++ mutates your very being into something unrecognizable – half human, half deep-sea nightmare with bulging eyes and too many teeth. Ten years of memory management violations, pointer arithmetic, and template metaprogramming will do that to you. The rest just destroy your body, but C++ corrupts your mind until you start seeing everything as poorly encapsulated objects with questionable inheritance hierarchies. And yet we keep coming back for more. Masochists, the lot of us.

When someone says they "really like writing in C," what they actually mean is C++. The stick figure excitedly points to "C with classes" while the brutal reality of pure C programming reveals itself: "segmentation fault (core dumped)." It's like saying you enjoy swimming with sharks when you've only been in a pool with a plastic toy shark. Pure C doesn't forgive your memory management sins—it just kills your program and walks away without even leaving a note.

The joke that haunts multithreaded nightmares! This is a twisted take on the classic knock-knock joke, but with a programming punchline about race conditions. For the uninitiated souls: a race condition is when two threads access shared data simultaneously and the outcome depends on which one finishes first—essentially chaos incarnate. The brilliance here is that "Ray" interrupts before the expected "Race condition who?" response can complete—perfectly demonstrating how race conditions wreck expected program flow. It's basically what happens when your code's timing is about as reliable as a weather forecast.