A Brief Totally Accurate History Of Programming Languages
https://medium.com/commitlog/a-brief-totally-accurate-history-of-programming-languages-d2e2b09553f8
One Hundred Percent Inspired by Facts
Casper Beyer
May 23, 2019
1800
Joseph Marie Jacquard teaches a loom to read punch cards, creating the
first heavily multi-threaded processing unit. His invention was fiercely
opposed by silk-weavers who were worried about robots taking their jobs.
1842
Ada Lovelace gets bored of being noble and scribbles in a notebook what
will later be known as the first published computer program, only slightly
inconvenienced by the fact that there were no computers around at the time.
1936
Alan Turing invents everything, the Queen is keen on him but Turing
fancies the lads over her, as a result of this so she has him castrated.
The Queen later got over it, unfortunately he had already been dead for
centuries (internet-time) at that time.
1936
Alonzo Church also invents everything with Turing, but being across the
pond he was not fancied nor castrated by the Queen.
1957
John Backus creates FORTRAN which is the first language that real
programmers use.
1959
Grace Hopper gets tired of sparring with Chuck Norris and invents the
first enterprise ready business oriented programming language. Because
enterprise ready software needs to have long and boring names she decides to
call it the “common business-oriented language” or COBOL for short.
1964
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz decide programming is too hard and they need
to go back to basics so they drop line numbers, they call their programming
language BASIC.
1970
Niklaus Wirth makes Pascal become a thing along with a bunch of other
languages, this guy really liked making languages.
He also invents Wirth’s law which makes Moore’s law obsolete because
software developers will write so bloated software that even mainframes cannot
keep up. This will later be proven to be true with the invention of Electron.js
and the abstractions built on top of it.
1972
Dennis Ritchie got bored during work hours at Bell Labs so he decided to
make C which had curly braces so it ended up being a huge success. Afterwards
he added segmentation faults and other developer friendly features to aid
productivity.
Still having a couple of hours remaining he and his buddies at Bell Labs
decided to make an example program demonstrating C, they make a operating
system called Unix.
1980
Alan Kay invents object oriented programming and calls it Smalltalk, in
Smalltalk everything is an object, even an object is an object. No one really
has time for his small talk.
1987
Larry Wall has a religious experience, becomes a preacher and makes Perl
the doctrine. Everyone was onboard with up until the new testament.
1983
Jean Ichbiah notices that Ada Lovelace programs never actually ran and
decided to create a language with her name. The language rings true to the name
and remains obscure.
1986
Brac Box and Tol Move decide to make an unreadable version of C based on
Smalltalk which they call Objective-C. To this day no one is able to understand
the syntax.
1983
Bjarne Stroustrup takes a quick trip in his DeLorean back to the futurem
while there he notices that C is not taking enough time to compile. Meaning
developers don’t have enough time to mess around while claiming the code is
compiling. In response to this he adds every feature he can think of to the
language and names it C++.
Programmers everywhere adopt it so they have genuine excuses to watch cat
videos and read xkcd while working.
1991
Guido van Rossum writes a cooking book about eggs and spam.
1993
Roberto Ierusalimschy and friends decide they need a scripting language
local to Brazil, during localization an error was made that made indices start
counting from 1 instead of 0, they named it Lua.
1994
Rasmus Lerdorf makes a template engine for his personal homepage CGI
scripts, he releases his dotfiles on the web.
The world decides to use these dotfiles for everything and in a frenzy
Rasmus throws some extra database bindings in there for the heck of it and
calls it PHP.
1995
Yukihiro Matsumoto is not very happy, he notices other programmers are
not happy. He creates Ruby to make programmers happy. After creating Ruby
“Matz” is happy, the Ruby community is happy, everyone is happy.
Sidenote: Thank you Matt, I was a Rubyist for a couple of years and I was
indeed very happy.
1995
Brendan Eich takes the weekend off to design a language that will be used
to power every single web browser in the world and eventually also Skynet. He
originally went to Netscape and said it was called LiveScript but Java became
popular during the code review so they decided they better use curly braces and
rename it to JavaScript.
Java turned out to be a trademark mess that would get them in trouble so
JavaScript gets renamed to ECMAScript during standardisation and everyone still
calls it JavaScript.
1996
James Gosling invents Java, the first truly overly verbose object
oriented programming language where design patterns rule supreme over
pragmatism.
Its super effective, the manager provider container provider service
manager singleton manager provider pattern is born.
2001
Anders Hejlsberg re-invents Java and calls it C# because programming in C
feels cooler than Java. Everyone loves this new version of Java for totally not
being like Java.
2005
David Hanselmeyer Hansen creates a web framework for Ruby called Ruby on
Rails, people no longer remember that the two are separate things. People are
becoming less happy.
2006
John Resig writes a helper library for JavaScript. Somehow everyone
thinks it’s a language on its own and make careers of copy and pasting jQuery
codes from the internets.
2009
Ken Thompson and Rob Pike decide to make a language like C, but with les
sspeed and more safety equipment and making it more marketable with Gophers as
mascots.
They call it Go, make it open source and fund it by selling Gopher
branded kneepads and hardhats separately.
2010
Graydon Hoare also wants to make a language like C, he calls it Rust.
Everyone demands that every single piece of software be rewritten in Rust
immediately. Graydon wants shinier things and starts working on Swift for Apple.
2012
Anders Hjelsberg wants to write C# in web browsers, he designs TypeScript
which is JavaScript but with more Java in it.
2013
Jeremy Ashkenas wants to be happy like Ruby developers so he creates
CoffeeScript which compiles to be JavaScript but looks more like Ruby. Jeremy
never became truly happy like Matz and Ruby developers.
2014
Chris Lattner makes Swift with the primary design goal of not being
Objective-C, in the end it looks like Java.
James Iry, whom I can only assume is a fellow computer science historian
made some similar observations back in 2009.
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html?m=1
