A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages

A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages(james-iry.blogspot.com)

303 points by toddc 17 years ago | 14 comments

tumult 17 years ago |

Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.

Alright, this was surprisingly amusing. Thanks.

jfarmer 17 years ago |

My favorite: 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

visitor4rmindia 17 years ago |

Oh my God! That was the best belly laugh I've had in a long time. Very fun read.

>1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later stil, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

akkartik 17 years ago | |

The footnote's better!

chops 17 years ago |

Each one of those was quite amusing.

1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP.

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence.

I genuinely laughed out loud at this article.

gurraman 17 years ago | |

As did I. I laughed out loud at most all of them.

edu 17 years ago |

"""Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles"""

blogimus 17 years ago |

Hmm, no mention of Erlang. I'll add one.

1986 - Inspired by Prolog, Joe Armstrong designs a massively scalable messaging system that allows computers to SMS each other and has the attention span of a teenager. He calls it Erlang.

access_denied 17 years ago | |

BTW, "lang" == german for "long"

martythemaniak 17 years ago |

I like [1] the subtle touch of adding Graham-essay type footnotes to the section featuring Graham and arc.

[1] I suspect a large part of this like is due to the old trick of throwing in a reference only a subgroup of the readership will appreciate, thus forming a special bond with the author.

tlrobinson 17 years ago |

2003 - A drunken Martin Odersky sees a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup ad featuring somebody's peanutbutter getting on somebody else's chocolate and has an idea. He creates Scala, a language that unifies constructs from both object oriented and functional languages. This pisses off both groups and each promptly declares jihad. Odersky goes into hiding. His whereabouts remain a highly guarded secret although there is some speculation that he is locked in a Swiss vault.

This sounds vaguely familiar.

jeroen 17 years ago |

Not as accurate or complete as http://www.levenez.com/lang/lang.pdf , but a nice read.

And if anyone is wondering (as I was) how many programming languages there are, http://people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm has information on about 2500 languages.

zandorg 17 years ago | |

I looked for 'E' both for the Amiga language, and Mark Miller's language.

Neither was there! Bizarre...

mronge 17 years ago |

I love the one on Obj-C

"1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic."