Interesting China reading for March 8th, 2010.

There seem to be these periodic flare-ups in the blogosphere and community site circuit where some poor programming language ends up being skewered thoroughly by roving gangs of self-righteous programmers. One or two articles will suddenly receive wide circulation listing arguments why language X is clearly a horrible choice for any “real programmer”, and then examples to prove this will inevitably be given: "false" equals true, (++*p1)++[--x] is actually a valid expression, or Begin and End are used instead of { and }. The couple of articles defending the language that inevitably appear will receive long streams of comments vilifying the author for being an idiot, or even worse, a hack. The sad realty of all the hullabaloo, however, is that all of this is ultimately pointless, and typically based on some silly assumptions.