[joe_the_user]

Well, various parts are taken amusingly but I think this is aiming to be a serious inquiry into the psychology of programming language choice, which a bit different from the psychology of actually programming. Language choice is much wrapped up with power and ideology, areas that Zizek etc focus on strongly.

[DonHopkins]

And letting go of a programming language that you fell in love with, who was ripped away from you or died for whatever reason, can be an emotionally difficult experience. Then there's that period where you're not ready to learn a new programming language, because you don't want to dishonor the memory of the lost language you're still mourning for.

At the end of the talk, he mentioned that Paul Graham writes poetically about Romantic Languages, and classifies Lisp and Scheme as Melancholy Languages, but he would also classify Lisp as a Hysteric Language, and COBOL is a Depression Language. ;O

From the paper:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vulk-blog/ThePervertsGuid...

Other Categories of Enjoyment: Based on the subject's relationship with the object of desire, there are various other categories of enjoyment that can be applied to languages. Depression within Lacanian psychoanalysis can be described as the stopping up of circulation around the object of desire. With depression, the object is lost and enjoyment is retrieved from the reminiscing of the loss. With melancholy the very memory of the object is lost (a loss of a loss) so the enjoyment comes from the romantic attitude with respect to the history of the language.

[dleslie]

My feelings for Turbo Pascal are not unlike my feelings for the first ex who I truly cared about. It's hard to let go of that first love.