Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical situation. It involves a geek talking to a hot girl at a party, so already we can guess that it is
very hypothetical. The geek has been making small talk for a little while, and after quickly running out of material about the weather and the music that is playing he reaches for the old cliché:
Geek: "So what do you do?"
Hot Girl: "Well, during the day I work at a shelter for injured native wild-life and on weekends I dance in a cage at the Viper Room."
Geek: "Cool!"
Hot Girl: "And what about you?"
Geek: "I'm a ________ programmer for a small software company."
:where ________ stands for the programming language that you work in. Now obviously the mere mention of computer programming has already got the hot girl searching through her in-memory database for a quick excuse to start talking to someone else. But ________ will determine just how quickly she is going to run away and affect your chances of being able to change the subject before she does.
To help educate the nerd public on this issue I have interviewed 500 bikini models and asked for their impressions of some common programming languages. Here are the results:
- PHP: If she is curious, she will ask you what PHP stands for. You explain that it is a recursive abbreviation - "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". As soon as you use the word 'recursive' in a party conversation you realize that your night is over and you politely leave.
- Ruby: She giggles as you admit that you spend all day working with a tool that has a girl's name. At this point she mentions that her boyfriend is a mechanic who uses tools with manly names like Stanley, Armstrong and Sidchrome.
- Python: As soon as you speak the name of your preferred programming language the hot girl gives you a look of pity. In her mind you use the language with the conspicuously phallic name to compensate for insecurities in other areas. She sees you in the same way as she sees middle-age men driving V8 convertibles.
- C++: No further explanation required. You can't even say the name of your favourite language without using a unary operator. As soon as the 'C-plus-plus' gibberish leaves your mouth she has already replied "I've got a migraine, so I am going home".
- Fortran: Confused, she says that 'Godzilla vs. Fortran' is her little brother's favourite movie. The conversation moves smoothly on to the latest Mark Wahlberg flick that she is eagerly waiting to see. Crisis averted. Somehow you work up the courage to ask her out to see 'Shooter'. She gets to find out what a cool geek you are and you both live happily ever after.
In the unlikely event that a female ever reads this post, the ladies might be wondering how this hypothetical situation would play out if the roles were reversed. To let you in on the secret, if a man asks a woman what she does for a living he is not really going to listen to the answer - he is already concentrating on imagining her naked.
What does the hot girl at the party think of your programming language?
