5 ms·

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)

213 points by ldubinets 13y ago

yuushi 13y ago
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."
kunai 13y ago
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_ 13y ago
  Actually, "turtles all the way down" isn't a programming joke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down). But I suppose you're referencing Logo?
  - kunai 13y ago
    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.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  And cosmologists.
acheron 13y ago
Always a good read. My favorite is Javascript, though Lisp "recursion and condescension" is good too.
steverobinson 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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".
mercuryrising 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
verandaguy 13y ago
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."
girvo 13y ago
Love the PHP one "...PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day." And I write PHP daily!
- robryan 13y ago
  PHP documentation is actually pretty good, there is a joke to be had about the comments on the docs though.
gilgoomesh 13y ago
I'm confused by the title. Which bit was wrong?
- ldubinets 13y ago
  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.
antimora 13y ago
This is probably more accurate history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_language... and this is a good book on programming languages in general: http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-Sebesta/dp/0131395319 http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-...
- Sammi 13y ago
  Woosh...
- realrocker 13y ago
  Heh. classic fun.
siddboots 13y ago
> 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?
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Maybe Erik Meijer?
- pjmlp 13y ago
  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/es012-meijer.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/papers...
- mhartl 13y ago
  Is there more to it than just that Visual Basic is the antithesis of ML? Nope, you've got it. This is the joke.
wsh91 13y ago
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 13y ago
  After reading that, now I want learn it.
  - abrichr 13y ago
    http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun
shared4you 13y ago
> 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.
kriro 13y ago
Haha this is great. Funny stuff, well done.
teeja 13y ago
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.)

213 points by ldubinets 13y ago

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."

kunai 13y ago

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_ 13y ago
Actually, "turtles all the way down" isn't a programming joke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down). But I suppose you're referencing Logo?
- kunai 13y ago
  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.
zeckalpha 13y ago
And cosmologists.

acheron 13y ago

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

steverobinson 13y ago

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 13y ago
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".

mercuryrising 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

verandaguy 13y ago

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."

girvo 13y ago

Love the PHP one "...PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day." And I write PHP daily!

robryan 13y ago
PHP documentation is actually pretty good, there is a joke to be had about the comments on the docs though.

gilgoomesh 13y ago

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

ldubinets 13y ago
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.

antimora 13y ago

This is probably more accurate history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_language... and this is a good book on programming languages in general: http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-Sebesta/dp/0131395319 http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-...

Sammi 13y ago
Woosh...
realrocker 13y ago
Heh. classic fun.

siddboots 13y ago

> 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?

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Maybe Erik Meijer?
pjmlp 13y ago
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/es012-meijer.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/papers...
mhartl 13y ago
Is there more to it than just that Visual Basic is the antithesis of ML? Nope, you've got it. This is the joke.

wsh91 13y ago

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 13y ago
After reading that, now I want learn it.
- abrichr 13y ago
  http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

shared4you 13y ago

> 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.

kriro 13y ago

Haha this is great. Funny stuff, well done.

teeja 13y ago

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.)