Funny history of programming languages

Cory Doctorow 5:50 pm Mon May 10, 2010

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)

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