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. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
Read the rest of the article for coverage of people and languages up through the current time. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Smalltalk, Lisp, Perl, C, C++, and many others get similarly humorous treatment.
See The Register: Catch as catch can — A light-hearted look at exception handling
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2016, @03:19PM
The linked thing is old.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ThePhilips on Saturday June 25 2016, @03:38PM
Very old, but I still laughed.
Though personally I like the most an even older one: The Tao of Programming [mit.edu].
P.S. "A look back" section would be a nice addition to SN. A reflection at the old - and not so old - stuff, after the hype has died off, is always a good idea.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday June 25 2016, @08:22PM
They are using slashcode, which conveniently reposts old articles over and over again.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2016, @05:40PM
Someone opens a window and a plethora of trash, pollution, viruses, and scum blows in. He decides to make an operating system modeled and named after it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2016, @07:09PM
or, somebody got their wanker chopped off after they pissed off The Suits by making a terse cryptic UI, and named an OS after it.
(Score: 2) by number6 on Saturday June 25 2016, @06:37PM
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today -- discussion at Hacker News, 20 June 2016 [ycombinator.com]
Skimming through the discussion, it seems that Kay thinks today's programming language landscape is a limp-wristed circle-jerk.
The only language he gave a passing positive mention to is Erlang (from my quick reading).
It seems he is saying programming and its languages need to start the paradigm again from scratch if society is to accelerate towards a brave new world.
(Score: 2) by seeprime on Sunday June 26 2016, @06:51AM
Then he should create the new languages that he feels are needed and offer free classes on why they are superior to existing languages, and how to code with them.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2016, @07:03PM
Brendan Eich invents LiveScript, which is christened "JavaScript" by Eich's employer, Netscape, to emphasize its remarkable affinity with another new language, Java. Here is a list of the similarities between the two programming languages:
1. Strings are immutable
2. Language names begin with "Java".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2016, @10:12AM
1. Strings are immutable
QuakeC?
(The best language)
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday June 25 2016, @07:15PM
There is also a humorous history of BASIC (The programming language for people too lazy to lean FORTRAN) here:
http://www.frostyonline.com/humor/displaypages/JokeSingle.asp?ID=896&Title=History+of+the+BASIC+family+of+languages [frostyonline.com]
(Score: 2) by ticho on Saturday June 25 2016, @09:03PM
That jab at goto got me laughing out loud, thanks. :)
(Score: 1) by zugedneb on Saturday June 25 2016, @09:41PM
from the tfa: "John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP..."
as I understand it, lisp is the actual implementation of parentheses rules from algebra.
why call "invent" this?
why not implemented, constructed or engineered LISP?
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Sunday June 26 2016, @01:58AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.