
Ok, let’s start!
This article is going to be less demanding than usual (but still technical and nerdy :)). We are going to analyze what if all our favourite Coding languages used every day would be Game of Thrones characters and why?
It is maybe a very long time ago since you have not watched it, but I believe the HBO success is remaining in our minds. The singularity and diversity of each figure can be used to understand more about the current diversity in terms of coding languages.
Because winter is coming, let’s have a little refresher, and you will be able to brag in front of your colleagues and friends during the long night.
Prerequisite
Because of the long list of game of thrones characters, this article will be divided into 2 parts. The first part will talk about 4 major houses:
- Stark
- Targaryen
- Lannister
- Baratheon
And a second part will cover the extra characters, which are even more interesting such as the King of the Night, Lord Varis, Jorah Mormont, etc….
Let’s start now with my favourite, Stark house.
Stark dynasty
Eddard Stark – C
Definitely one of the major player of the first season. One of the first coding language. He was very powerful and popular in the past.
Ned stark like C language does everything in the traditional way. This programming language needs a lot of work, but everyone respects it.
A younger developer will forget about him in the future, but his legacy remains through his children (C++, C# …).
Jon Snow – C++
Like his father, he does everything in the traditional way. He is the most genuine descendant of Eddard Stark, but more complex and with more feature.
Such as his father, tradition is everything; you need a lot of work and dedication if you want to understand him (Daenarys can confirm). Even if you achieved a lot of project next to him, you never feel like you know him enough.
Arya Stark – C
Did you really think she would follow the rules and stay along with her family? No! Arya Stark such as C# is open source for a few years now already.
Such as Arya Stark, C# has royal blood. During its childhood, C# was living in a noble family (C# was Microsoft’s property). However, such as Arya in season 3, C# compiler became open source in 2016 and can now have multiple faces.
Sansa Stark – Objective-C
According to Wikipedia(1): "Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language."
Like Sansa during the first seasons, Objective-C helped to balance the relation between Stark’s family and Kingdom of King’s Landing thanks her ability to bring small talks and her diplomacy.
She added tact to C family coding languages which are by essence rough, sharp, and complex to understand.
Let’s talk now about Baratheon’s House; they were shining in the good old days. Do you still remember about them?
Baratheon Family
Such as in the series, Baratheon family has disappeared at an early stage, but they have been one of the most powerful family in the past.
Robert Baratheon – COBOL
Very powerful in the past, COBOL was used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
However, young developers like me (I am 28 years old) already almost forgot about him. COBOL is pretty much dead today. Furthermore, such as Robert Baratheon, COBOL did not let a strong heritage in the world.
Joffrey Baratheon – VBA
He doesn’t look like his father (Robert Baratheon) at all, and I suspect that he must be the son of Cersei and Jaime Lannister.
Such as VBA, he was so powerful in the past that everyone had to follow his rules. Like Joffrey Baratheon, VBA is very selfish and has poor diplomatic relations with other companies.
Every VBA user knows that you don’t have an extensive possibility of libraries such as Python for example who has TensorFlow, GoogleCoLab, MachineLearning Libraries and different API such as for Kaggle or Stanford University. VBA and Joffrey Baratheon were evil in diplomacy, and that made them die.
To recap, everyone hates him, and no one regrets his murder.
Thank you, god, he is dead now.
Now let’s turn on some fire, and go south to meet Targaryen Family.
Targaryen
Daenerys Targaryen – JavaScript
She deserves an entire chapter to her alone. Challenges and downs have fulfilled her past.
Underestimated initially, but very powerful today, mainly when she is accompanied by her 3 libraries sorry … dragons (Angular, React and Vue.JS).
Such as Daenerys Targaryen, no one took JavaScript seriously when it first came out, and for a long time, it was considered nothing but a front-end language (2)(Source: Intersog). Even Google try to kill Java as an early stage by releasing Kotlin. How underrated JS has been!
Today such as the dragons, JS is on fire and is widely used for server-side development.
I don’t want to say much about Targaryen as Daenarys represent most of them. Now, let’s go back to King’s Landing and meet the Lannister’s.
Lannister House
Such as the Lannister Family, programming language jungle presents a wide variety of programming language with distinct specificities.
"A Lannister always pays his debts." – Lannister House
Tyrion Lannister – Python
Such as Tyrion Lannister within the series, Python was hated in the early days because of its shortness. But over time, Tyrion Lannister such as Python gained fans and legacy.
By contrast to his nephew King Joffrey, he became an important character thanks to his diplomatic skills, and it reached a point of the time that everyone asks for his advice. According to Wikipedia (3), Python has 137,000 libraries today. You can never die with such diplomatic skills.
Furthermore, such as the Lannisters, Python is tailored for finance users (I am using it every single day at work to develop my models, algorithm, or even trading robots). That’s the reason why Tyrion was the King’s hand and managed the King’s Landing’s finances during so many years.
If you want an example on how to tackle finance using Python, I recommend this brilliant Medium article:
Python: I have tested a Trading Mathematical Technic in RealTime.
Concerning my own experience, such as Tyrion Lannister during season 1, I hated Python during my early days(as an ex-PhD student, I started to code with R). But I am totally addicted to it today, and I am asking him advice every day.
Cersei Lannister – PHP
Unpredictable and pitiless, you can hate it as much as you want, you must recognise that Cersei/PHP is the strong queen of the web, sorry … Westeros and almost impossible to destroy but let’s see in the next seasons (If they changed their mind and chose to produce extra episodes, finger crossed).
All PHP coders will agree, whatever can be your experience, you will always find PHP chaotic.
Jamie Lannister – Kotlin
Such as its siblings Kotlin has royal blood. Developed by google engineers and sent to kill Java, Kotlin and Jamie Lannister are remaining lovely and very charming.
Kotlin is so instinctive and concise that you can code with one hand.
Jamie was the last personage represented in this first part.
In the second part, we will make our prediction concerning the other players in the game. Now, what about R, SQL, Java, Go, Perl, Swift, HTML and others?
I let you bet and try to connect all these coding languages to the right remaining characters. Don’t forget to follow either me or Toward Data Science if you don’t want to miss the second part.
I hope you enjoyed this article, even if that has been less technical than usual but still related to data science. And don’t forget to make your prediction in the comment. You can find below some sources if you want to know more about programming languages.
Thank you for your attention
Happy coding
To become Tyrion Lannister:
Just as personal data scientist tips, if you want to learn Python from scratch and know more about algorithmic trading to become the next Tyrion Lannister, I highly recommend this course:
Source:
(1) Wikipedia- Objective-C:
(2) Intersog:
(3) Wikipedia- Python: