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
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(Image: Grace Hopper and UNIVAC, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from publicresourceorg's photostream)
