Python: What if everything was a dict?

Java: What if everything was an object?

JavaScript: What if everything was a dict and an object?

C: What if everything was a pointer?

APL: What if everything was an array?

Tcl: What if everything was a string?

Prolog: What if everything was a term?

LISP: What if everything was a pair?

Scheme: What if everything was a function?

Haskell: What if everything was a monad?

Assembly: What if everything was a register?

Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?

COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?

C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?

Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?

Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END

C++: What if we added everything to the language?

C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?

Rust: What if garbage collection didn't exist?

Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?

Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?

Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?

PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?

VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?

VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?

Forth: What if everything was a stack?

ColorForth: What if the stack was green?

PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?

XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?

Make: What if everything was a dependency?

m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?

Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?

Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?

Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?

Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?

Malbolge: What if there is no god?

Microsoft Windows: What if everything crashed?

Microsoft Windows: What if everything was in a registry?

Microsoft Windows: what if everything was an error?

Microsoft Windows: what if everything was a bug?

Microsoft Windows: what if everything was broken?

DOS: What if everything was ‘Abort, retry, fail?’ ?

DOS: What if everything was ‘Bad command or file name’?

BIOS: What if everything was ‘Invalid system disk’?

bash:` What if everything was ‘command not found’?

bash: What if everything was ‘No such file or directory’?

FAT: What if everything was fragmented?

FAT: What if everything was obese?

NTFS: What if everything was fragmented?

ext*:` What if everything just worked?

zfs: What if everything was compressed?

Assembly: What if every instruction halted and caught fire (‘Halt and Catch Fire’)? ⁰

C11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff? ¹

Objective C: What if everything was Objectionable? ²

Programming: What if there wasn't documentation?

Microsoft: What if we didn’t follow standards?

Microsoft: What if we denied security holes even when there were exploits in the wild?

Microsoft: what if everything was a mistake?

SCO: What if we were to take everyone to court for 'theft' of 'our intellectual property' - including code that we knowingly contributed to under a certain licence that means legally our claim is invalid?

Oracle: What if we bought out a corporation like Sun Microsystems and then changed the copyright (including the authors) of SunOS, Solaris, Java, etc. to be Oracle rather than the real authors?

Steve Jobs: What if I said in 1996 ‘We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas’ (Triumph of the Nerds) and then in 2011 said ‘I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.’?

Steve Jobs: What if I didn’t do any of the technical work but I got the huge bonus (because I kept the bonus secret) for all the work I made my ‘friend’ Steve Wozniak do without telling him why he had to finish it quickly? ³

Plumber: What if everything was ‘Broken pipe’? ⁴

Airports: What if everything was ‘Too many users’? ⁵

[0] Halt and Catch Fire (CPU instruction)

[1] Yes this is the same as C++11 in the original text; here I refer to the comments by the International Obfuscated C Code Contest judges in their iocccsize.c tool that checks if the entry is within size limits imposed by the judges. And I couldn’t agree more if I’m to think much about it:

/*
 * The following editorial plea expresses a view shared by more than zero
 * IOCCC judges. It may not represent the opinion of all those involved
 * with this code nor the International Obfuscated C Code Contest as a whole:
 *
 * The long list of reserved words below should be a source
 * of embarrassment to some of those involved in standardizing C.
 * The growing list of reserved words, along with an expanding set of
 * linguistic inventions has the appearance of feature
 * creep that, if left unchecked, risks turning a beautifully elegant
 * language into a steaming pile of biological excretion.
 *
 * The history of the IOCCC has taught us that even minor changes
 * to the language are not always well understood by compiler writers,
 * let alone the standards body who publishes them. We have enormous
 * sympathy for C compiler writers who must keep up with the creeping
 * featurism.  We are aware of some C standards members who share
 * these concerns.  Alas, they seem to be a minority.
 *
 * The C standards body as a whole, before they emit yet more mountains of new
 * standardese, might wish consider the option of moth-balling their committee.
 * Or if they must produce a new standard, consider naming whatever
 * follows c11 as CNC (C’s Not C).  :-)
 */
 

[2] Objective C is so hideous and so unlike C in look (at least looks) that it's a huge insult to the beautiful C language and it's just wrong. And false.

[3] I refer to the story behind the Atari and the game Breakout where he lied to Wozniak about the amount of money they would get and then pocketed a huge bonus when Wozniak - his ‘friend’ - did all the work.

[4] This refers to the Unix error message 'Broken pipe' that has absolutely nothing to do with plumbing but rather the Unix pipe (which isn't to say there is no inspiration or similarity to pipes in the real world).

[5] This refers to the Unix error message 'Too many users' which is actually an error I have never seen; for all I know it's worded differently (I could write a simple C program to print the exact error message but at this time I don't have the energy or inclination to do so even though it's only a few lines of code). Anyway the idea is airports have so many people all over that it's ridiculous esp for those who are anxious around crowds.