Item:
“When all you have is C, everything looks like a thumb.”
General Information about Item:
- Oral Folklore: joke
- English
- USA
Informant Data:
Anthony Addo is a 20 year old, American-Ghanaian Dartmouth computer science major modified with linguistics, from Ghana.
Contextual Data:
Anthony first read this piece of folklore on a Stack Overflow post, and could imagine using it if he was assigned a project to do in C for a class that would be very simple to do in Java or Python, but requires extensive knowledge to complete in C.
Transcript of Associated File:
Informant’s Comments:
“It means that C is a tool that can achieve many things, but achieving even the most simple of tasks can be very burdensome and onerous.” Another variant of this folklore he is aware of is a GIF of two men standing across from each other, one wearing a shirt that says C and one wearing a shirt that says Java. The man in the Java shirt acts like he is preparing to fight or hit the C man, waving his arms around and moving a lot. The man in the C shirt doesn’t move at all, and then with one quick hit knocks out his opponent. “This points to the superiority of C over Java.”
Collector’s Comments:
This joke can be classified as verbal folklore, and more specifically a proverb.
Tags/Keywords:
- C, Java, joke