The Dead Language
A customer enters a shop. The shop is clean. The shop is well-lit. The shop has, mounted behind the counter on a tasteful wooden perch, a programming language.
“I wish to register a complaint,” the customer says. “This JavaScript what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique — it’s broken.”
The shopkeeper peers at the language on the perch. It is, admittedly, not looking its best. Something involving [] + {} producing "[object Object]" appears to have happened to it recently, and there is an expression on its face — if programming languages can be said to have faces — that suggests typeof null has just returned "object" for the sixty-billionth time and it has decided, on the whole, not to care.
“Broken?” the shopkeeper says. “No no, it’s resting.”
“Look, I know a dead language when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”
“It’s not dead. It’s resting. Remarkable language, JavaScript. Beautiful plumage.”
“The plumage don’t enter into it. Its type coercion system violates the principle of least astonishment so comprehensively that mathematicians have started using it as a counterexample in papers about transitivity.”
“Well, you see,” the shopkeeper says, reaching beneath the counter and producing something that glints with an unseemly number of parentheses, “that’s not really a problem with the language. The semantics are perfectly sound. Lovely runtime. Closures derived from Scheme, prototypes from Self, runs on every device possessed of a screen and several that aren’t — no, the bird is fine. It’s the syntax that wants improving.”
“You what?”
The shopkeeper nods encouragingly, eyes aglint with something one wouldn’t call malice, yet one would also struggle for considerable time in any attempt to actually define what one would call it.
The customer eyes the parenthetical object with suspicion.
“What,” he says, “is that?”
“That,” the shopkeeper says, with the quiet confidence of someone who has discovered that the not-quite-so-dead language before them, was, despite odours wafting contrarily, merely sleeping and has, moreover, been dreaming in s-expressions, “is Lykn.”