What is an example of “plain-text code”, or of someone fainting at the sight of it?

The Java® Language Specification explains that “Programs are written in Unicode”, which can reasonably be described as “Plain Text”, but I would be surprised to see someone fainting at the sight of one.

The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)

Well so is torture

bytecode and IL enter the chat

If programming languages are made for humans, then explain Assembly. Or better yet, try debugging a segfault in C at 3 AM and tell me that was designed with human comfort in mind.

Sure, some languages pretend to be human-friendly (looking at you, Python), but then you hit regex or dependency hell, and suddenly it’s like deciphering alien hieroglyphs. Let’s not even start on Lisp—parentheses everywhere like it’s trying to smother you in syntax.

No, programming languages aren’t made for humans—they’re made for machines, and we’re just the poor fools trying to survive the translation layer.

They’re not humans, they’re programmers.

*except JavaScript

some languages are however made to be anti-human, looking at you brainfuck and whitespace