A thin, bedraggled stranger came to the Temple one night
and asked for master Kaimu. The master was roused and
brought to the gate, whereupon the stranger said:
“For years I have wandered this pitiless land, seeking the
perfect programming language. Name any one and I’ve given it
a go, be it fast or slow, high-level or low, from Ada to
Zeno. But whatever the pluses there are minuses too, so I
pack my things and hit the road again—which in this case led
me to your door.”
Kaimu asked the stranger to describe the language of his
heart’s desire.
“It must be suitable enterprise-wide,” the stranger replied,
“client-side and server-side, in scripting, in shells and in
spreadsheet cells. I need it real-time, multi-threaded and
optionally object-oriented; with garbage collection,
deadlock detection, custom exceptions, auto-resizing arrays
of things and regular expressions for matching strings. I
want the simplicity of BASIC, the purity of Smalltalk, the
brevity of Haskell, the speed of C, the consistency of Lisp,
the readability of Python, the flexibility of Perl, and the
portability of... Java, I guess, but with native code
bindings that aren’t a mess.”
“Then tomorrow morning we shall assist you as best we can,”
said Kaimu. “But tonight you must spend in the carpenter’s
shed below the south wall.”
The stranger bowed and departed to make his bed amid sawdust
and wood shavings. As Kaimu left for his own chambers a monk
asked, “What is your design for him?”
“When dawn breaks,” replied the master, “our guest will see
that on the walls of that shed are arrayed ten thousand
tools, each crafted to serve a unique purpose. No one would
mistake the hammer for the chisel, and no true carpenter
would renounce one for the other.”
At the sun’s first light the stranger returned to the Temple
gate, there to be greeted again by Kaimu and the monk.
“Do you still seek your heart’s desire?” asked Kaimu.
“No!” replied the stranger. “For in the shed I found a most
marvelous dagger, no larger than my hand, whose hilt opened
to reveal the most wonderous things: tweezers and
toothpicks, pliers and drill-bits, wrenches and reamers and
rulers and tiny blades too numerous to count! Holding it I
understood that my destiny is to fashion the thing I have
sought for—a language made of other languages, a tool to end
the need for other tools!”
And with that the stranger bowed and departed.
The monk turned to Kaimu, whose jaw had gone somewhat slack.
“What do the annals say on the subject of the Misunderstood
Lesson?”
“That it too brings wisdom,” said the master, “If only to
the hapless teacher. No doubt I would have been twice as
effective had I been half as clever.”
“And what of the stranger?” asked the monk. “Surely he will
fail in his endeavor, for that knife he prizes holds neither
hammer nor chisel. And should he partly succeed then all the
worse, for he will have added yet another language to a
world that already drowns in confusion.”
“Let him try, and good fortune to him!” said Kaimu. “If not
for fools of his fashion, we would not have Perl or Python,
Bourne shell or Tcl, and the world would be a poorer place.
I only grieve that you and I are not such fools, for since
we will never attempt the impossible, we can never hope to
achieve it.”
Thus master and monk left the gate, and went in to the
Temple together to greet the morning.
