A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)
The article humorously chronicles the history of programming languages from the early 1800s to the 1980s. It highlights key figures and their contributions, often with a satirical twist. The narrative illustrates the evolution of programming languages while poking fun at their complexities and the criticisms they faced.
- ▪Joseph Marie Jacquard used punch cards in 1801 to instruct a loom, marking an early form of programming.
- ▪Ada Lovelace wrote the first program in 1842, despite lacking actual computers to execute her code.
- ▪In 1972, Dennis Ritchie invented the C programming language, which became foundational for many subsequent languages.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.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.1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Blogspot.
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