1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her
efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual
computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her
techniques in order to program in UML.
[...]
1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN.
There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to
write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
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.
1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald
Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the
Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil."
This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately
unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to
relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.
1970
- Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, a procedural language. Critics
immediately denounce Pascal because it uses "x := x + y" syntax instead
of the more familiar C-like "x = x + y". This criticism happens in
spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
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.
[...]
1980 - 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."
1983 -
In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran,
Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming
language. In spite of the lack of evidence that any significant Ada
program is ever completed historians believe Ada to be a successful
public works project that keeps several thousand roving defense
contractors out of gangs.
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. Build times suffer.
Skynet's motives for performing the service remain unclear but
spokespeople from the future say "there is nothing to be concerned
about, baby," in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some
speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer
overrun.
[...]
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.
1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones,
Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional
language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using
monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by
explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors,
what's the problem?"
1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum
travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a
large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by
legions of followers, and announces to the world that "There Is Only One
Way to Do It." Poland becomes nervous.
1995 - At a neighborhood
Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti
is an excellent model for understanding both the World Wide Web and that
web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin
he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation
remains on that napkin to this day.
[...]
2003
- A drunken Martin Odersky sees a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad
featuring somebody's peanut butter 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.
Footnotes
- Fortunately
for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets
remains high.
- Catch
as catch can - Verity Stob
