
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009) - ldubinets
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
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mercuryrising
I like this. I like this a lot. I think far too often people take the concepts
we study too seriously. Things get challenging, things get precise, but the
moment the humor leaves, the creativity is gone.

Think of how easy it would be to learn something if you make a joke every 5
minutes while learning it (about the subject). In your mind, you turned this
abstract concept into something else, something funny, something with pathways
and connections that weren't expected. You manipulated it, changed it, saw it
in a new light. When you were trying to find humor, you created pathways to
other things that you thought were similar. You already connected the object
in your brain before you knew where it fit, just by trying to find humor in
it.

The really, really good ideas are the ones that almost sound like jokes, but
there's an ever so slight hint of severity to them.

Edit: I think I missed the point I was trying to make. Give this to a freshman
computer science student. They get to read a fun story. Instead of an intense
debate about which language is the best for thing X, or being forced to learn
language Y, they get an overview of the entire history, with some cheeky humor
that they can remember when they find a bit of truth, or a bit of false, in
this story. I will bet they remember this thing better than a 300 page book
dedicated to all of the subtle differences between the languages. Plus, they
might laugh and enjoy what they're doing.

~~~
tjr
One of the first books I encountered as I set out on a serious study of
computer science was _The Hacker's Dictionary_. There are surely shortcomings
and faults, and it was kind of out of date even when I read it (even more
now), but it was just so much fun! It expressed a certain silliness and
hackish sense of humor that I strongly resonated with, and reading the book
motivated me to learn things like Lisp, Emacs, and TeX, and to read (parts of)
Knuth, and to volunteer for GNU. That book inspired me to actually learn and
do stuff in programming way more than any "serious" book on programming.

~~~
salgernon
I first learned "programming" from my brothers copy of "a fortan coloring
book". The early 80s were a wonderful time for accessible computer literature.
I suppose _why's poignant guide to ruby is probably the closest I've seen
since.

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yuushi
I remember having read this before, but I always get a good chuckle from it;
all of the snark is incredibly well done. I always burst out laughing when
reading "Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them
popular by not having them."

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wsh91
Most pertinent to HN: "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."

~~~
alex_doom
After reading that, now I want learn it.

~~~
abrichr
<http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun>

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verandaguy
This honestly made my day. There's really no beating

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

1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964."

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steverobinson
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."

~~~
Symmetry
Reminds me of C being described as "a language that combines all the elegance
and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of
assembly language".

------
acheron
Always a good read. My favorite is Javascript, though Lisp "recursion and
condescension" is good too.

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gilgoomesh
I'm confused by the title. Which bit was wrong?

~~~
ldubinets
It took me a couple minutes too... The first comment sorts it out though.
Turns out that Jacquard's loom was multi-threaded after all.

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kunai
Made me chuckle. Especially "'look, it's all objects all the way down. Until
you reach turtles.'"

Any well-versed programmer will instantly recognize the turtle joke.

~~~
_mhr_
Actually, "turtles all the way down" isn't a programming joke
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down>). But I suppose
you're referencing Logo?

~~~
kunai
Yes, Logo was actually what I was referencing. I knew about the expression,
but it was interesting that the author of the article would use that specific
catchphrase, probably knowing that turtle graphics is commonly used to teach
programming to newbies.

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siddboots
> Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual
> Basic.

I feel like this went over my head... is this a .NET joke? Is there more to it
than just that just that Visual Basic is the antithesis of ML?

~~~
pjmlp
Maybe it refers to Erik Meijer?

A famous Haskell developer that went to Microsoft to work on Visual Basic team
and started there the LINQ project?

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/emeijer/papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/emeijer/papers/es012-meijer.pdf)

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girvo
Love the PHP one "...PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day."

And I write PHP daily!

~~~
robryan
PHP documentation is actually pretty good, there is a joke to be had about the
comments on the docs though.

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teeja
It is enjoyable. Most "history of programming..." stuff is a snoozathon. More
teachers should learn from the popularity of the "for Idiots" books. (The
most-talked-about teacher in my HS acted out parts of the Civil War with
costumes et. al.)

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shared4you
> 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP.

Lol, PG was born in 1964! He invented Lisp even before he was born :P I'd
credit PG for "re-inventing" Lisp though.

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kriro
Haha this is great. Funny stuff, well done.

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antimora
This is probably more accurate history:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_language...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages)

and this is a good book on programming languages in general:
[http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-
Robert-...](http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-
Sebesta/dp/0131395319)

~~~
Sammi
Woosh...

