/ Cory Doctorow / 5:50 pm Mon May 10, 2010

Funny history of programming languages

James Iry's "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages" had me snorting liquid out of my nose with delight at the contrafactual, geeky, in-jokey whimsy.
1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2].


1959 - After losing a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, Grace Hopper and several other sadists invent the Capitalization Of Boilerplate Oriented Language (COBOL) . Years later, in a misguided and sexist retaliation against Adm. Hopper's COBOL work, Ruby conferences frequently feature misogynistic material.

1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (via Links)

(Image: Grace Hopper and UNIVAC, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from publicresourceorg's photostream)

Previously:

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  1. Good laughs throughout, but this bit:

    Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

    had me in tears. Excellent find, Cory!

    1. Yeah, all of you keep laughing… the Prophet has told has told us how to deal with infidels.

  3. Great find! Thank you!

    (although I’m not sure what is says about me that I get these jokes and find them funny.)

    @efergus3 – funny for us, unfortunately they didn’t know GOTO was considered harmful back then, sort like x-rays or radiation, drove them both a bit loopy in the end.

    1993 – The script for the movie “Groundhog Day”, is the first movie script written in a programming language using the infamous do while loop.

  4. I’m more concerned by how quickly I recognized both the machine and the programming diva in the accompanying photo.

    I’m also slightly dismayed by the lack of Forth jokes, since it’s a ripe target.

  6. got some good lols out of this, thanks cory :)

    my favourite bit: “1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.”

  8. What I think is really interesting is that in 1962, when I took my first “Business Machines” course at a local junior college in Kansas City, there were maybe a dozed colleges in all of the U.S. which offered a computer degree. My how times have changed.

  9. Depressed after seeing people using Pascal for real work instead of disciplining CS students, Wirth creates Modula and Modula-2 with no I/O at all in a futile attempt at creating a language that’s completely useless.

  10. If you enjoyed this, you would also enjoy ‘How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language’. Variations have been created many times over the years.

    We got Forth jokes: self foot shoot dup!

  11. Grace Hopper was one of the “mothers of invention” in last Sunday’s NYT Sunday crossword puzzle. And today here’s her photo, not to mention another reference to COBOL. What a coincidence…or is it?!!!

  14. I think, it´s good for health be jock of serious themes as computer programming and others similar. Long life to tecno-jockers.

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