Interesting post on types of languages.
I was thinking along the same lines last evening, and I came up with a small theory that explains why so few pople can be bothered to learn Ada. It goes like this: There are 3 types of languages.
The first type of language says "we're going to make programming easy". Of course, this is a lie, because programming is inherently difficult and no language can make it easy. These languages fake it by being simplistic. Java is the most prominent member of this family of languages; most scripting languages also fall in this category. Beginners tend to flock to these "easy" languages and never learn proper programming skills (like e.g. memory management. If some Java "guru" reads this, ask yourself this one question: how many threads does your program have, and please justify the existence of each thread).
The second type says "we will let you do anything, absolutely anything you want, and the power is in the hands of the True Programmers". Languages in this category include, among others, C and C++. Many people take a foolish pride in being called a True Programmer, and therefore like these languages. I myself once was in this category: I would show off my skills by writing a single-line program that nobody else could read. But humans write bugs, and these languages don't lend a hand finding these. Hence the famous buffer overflows.
The third type is what I would call the "zen master" type of languages. They treat you like an apprentice, slapping you on the hand each time you make a small mistake, and they scorn at you for choosing the quick and easy path -- which leads to the Dark Side. If you accept their teachings, you quickly become a Master yourself. If you rebel against them, you will never achieve Enlightenment and will always produce bugs. The "zen master" languages are Pascal, Modula, Oberon, and, master of masters, Ada. The beauty of these languages is that, once you are Enlightened, you can apply your wisdom to other languages as well -- but often would prefer not to.
-- Ludovic Brenta.
While in Milwaukee, listened to a lot of oldies. They played a CCR song and then the same radio station later played a CCR-soundalike song which I remember from way back but came home trying to remember either the band name or the lyrics. I first tried black as part of the lyric, but too many hits came up. I then type into google "soundalike" and CCR and found "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)", 1972, with the note (A Creedence Clearwater Revival sound-alike song with a Sam Spade-like narrative set to music.)
Weren't a lot of hits but this luckily came up. No telling how much time I would have spent tracking this down. Darn Hollies, they were never a distinctive sound.
Listening to an old FXO archive, my ear caught another familiar melody in "Warm Miami Way" by Air Miami. Why do I try to outguess these guys; sure enough the next song was "You made me so very happy", a cover by the Jethros, originally by BS&T.
Listening to an old radio archive on WFMU, I noticed a familiar opening to a Lamont Dozier song called "Put Out My Fire". As is somewhat typical on soul songs, the opening dissolves into a different rhythm and groove which it stays in for the remainder of the song. Well, in fact the opening was the main beat to "Walking on the Moon" by The Police.
Here is the link: RealAudio
I was trying to come up with a random personal name. So I looked at the January 2004 edition of Outside Magazine and searched for names in the editorial masthead.
Assistant to the Editor: Karen Hustoft
Associate Editor: Grant Davis
So I thought to make up a combination name "Grant Hustoft". To make sure that this was somewhat original, I did a google search on Grant + Hustoft.
Second match that came up was an U.D. Army Prog software engineer that I know with the first name Grant. I know this was the same guy because it came off a UND web site, which is where he went to school.
Bottomline, this is a case of very small odds of any individual match combining with a large space of knowledge to match against.