If programming languages were cars...

• Ada is a tank. A butt-ugly tank that never breaks
  down. People laugh uncontrollably if you tell them you drive Ada, but really,
  do you want to be driving a sports car in a war zone?





• Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build
  the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it's running, but if
  you're careful it can go like a bat out of hell.

  
  

  Assembly Language: you are the car.

  
  



• Basic is a simple car useful for short drives to the
  local shops. Once popular with learner drivers, it has recently been
  stripped down to a shell and rebuilt by a major manufacturer, The new version
  has been refurbished for longer journeys, leaving only cosmetic similarities
  to the original model.





• C is a racing car that goes incredibly fast but
  breaks down every 50 miles.





• Cobol is reputed to be a car, but no self-respecting
  driver will ever admit having driven one.





• C# is a competing model of family station wagons.
  Once you use this, you're never allowed to use the competitors' products
  again.





• C++ is a souped-up version of the C racing car with
  dozens of extra features that only breaks down every 250 miles, but when it
  does, nobody can figure out what went wrong.





• Eiffel is a car that includes a built-in driving
  instructor with a French accent. He will help you quickly identify and learn
  from your mistakes, but don't you dare argue with him or he'll insult you and
  throw you out of the car.





• Erlang is a fleet of cars that all cooperate to get
  you where you want to go. It takes practice to be able to drive with one
  foot in each of several cars, but once you learn how you can drive over
  terrain that would be very hard to navigate any other way. In addition,
  because you're using so many cars, it doesn't matter if a few of them break
  down.





• Forth is a car you build yourself from a kit. Your
  car doesn't have to look or behave like anyone else's car. However, a Forth
  car will only go backwards.





• Fortran is a pretty primitive car; it'll go very
  quickly as long as you are only going along roads that are perfectly
  straight. It is believed that learning to drive a Fortran car makes it
  impossible to learn to drive any other model.





• Java is a family station wagon. It's easy to drive,
  it's not too fast, and you can't hurt yourself.





• Haskell is an incredibly elegantly-designed and
  beautiful car, which is rumored to be able to drive over extremely strange
  terrain. The one time you tried to drive it, it didn't actually drive along
  the road; instead, it made copies of itself and the road, with each
  successive copy of the road having the car a little further along. It's
  supposed to be possible to drive it in a more conventional way, but you don't
  know enough math to figure out how.

  
  
  

  Haskell is not really a car; it's an
  abstract machine in which you give a detailed description of what the process
  of driving would be like if you were to do it. You have to put the abstract
  machine inside another (concrete) machine in order to actually do any
  driving. You're not supposed to ask how the concrete machine works. There
  is also a way to take multiple abstract machines and make a single abstract
  machine, which you can then give to the concrete machine to make multiple
  trips one after another.





• Lisp looks like a car, but with enough
  tweaking you can turn it into a pretty effective airplane or
  submarine.

  
  

  Lisp: At first it doesn't seem to be a car at all, but
  now and then you spot a few people driving it around. After a point you
  decide to learn more about it and you realize it's actually a car that can
  make more cars. You tell your friends, but they all laugh and say these cars
  look way too weird. You still keep one in your garage, hoping one day they
  will take over the streets.

  
  



• Mathematica is a well-designed car that borrowed a
  lot from the Lisp car without giving it nearly the credit it deserved. It
  can solve equations to determine the most efficient way to get to the
  destination, but it costs a fortune





• Matlab is a car designed for novice drivers going on
  short trips over terrain similar to the terrain the Mathematica car is
  usually driven over. It is very comfortable when driving over this terrain,
  but if you go off the trail even a little the car becomes so hard to drive
  that more snobby drivers refuse to even acknowledge that it's a car.





• Ocaml is a very sexy European car. It's not quite as
  fast as C, but it never breaks down, so you end up going further in
  less time. However, because it's French, none of the controls are in the
  usual places.





• Perl is supposed to be a pretty cool car, but the
  driver's manual is incomprehensible. Also, even if you can figure out how to
  drive a Perl car, you won't be able to drive anyone else's.





• PHP is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, it's bizarre and
  hard to handle but everybody still wants to drive it.





• Prolog is fully automatic: you tell it what your
  destination looks like, and it does all the driving for you.
  However, the effort required to specify most destinations is
  equivalent to the effort of driving there.

  
  

  Prolog is a car with a unique trial-and-error GPS
  system. It will go down the road looking for your destination, and if it
  gets to the end of the street without finding it, it will back up and try the
  next street over and continue until you get where you need to go.

  
  



• Python is a great beginner's car; you can drive it
  without a license. Unless you want to drive really fast or on really
  treacherous terrain, you may never need another car.





• Ruby is a car that was formed when the Perl, Python
  and Smalltalk cars were involved in a three-way collision. A Japanese
  mechanic found the pieces and put together a car which many drivers think is
  better than the sum of the parts. Other drivers, however, grumble that a lot
  of the controls of the Ruby car have been duplicated or triplicated, with
  some of the duplicate controls doing slightly different things in odd
  circumstances, making the car harder to drive than it ought to be. A
  redesign is rumored to be in the works.





• Smalltalk is a small car originally designed for
  people who were just learning to drive, but it was designed so well that even
  experienced drivers enjoy riding in it. It doesn't drive very fast, but you
  can take apart any part of it and change it to make it more like what you
  wanted it to be. One oddity is that you don't actually drive it; you send it
  a message asking it to go somewhere and it either does or tells you that it
  didn't understand what you were asking.





• Visual Basic is a car that drives you.