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

213 点作者 ldubinets大约 12 年前

14 条评论

mercuryrising大约 12 年前
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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yuushi大约 12 年前
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."
wsh91大约 12 年前
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."
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verandaguy大约 12 年前
This honestly made my day. There's really no beating<p>"1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.<p>1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964."
steverobinson大约 12 年前
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."
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acheron大约 12 年前
Always a good read. My favorite is Javascript, though Lisp "recursion and condescension" is good too.
gilgoomesh大约 12 年前
I'm confused by the title. Which bit was wrong?
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kunai大约 12 年前
Made me chuckle. Especially "'look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.'"<p>Any well-versed programmer will instantly recognize the turtle joke.
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siddboots大约 12 年前
&#62; Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.<p>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?
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girvo大约 12 年前
Love the PHP one "...PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day."<p>And I write PHP daily!
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teeja大约 12 年前
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.)
shared4you大约 12 年前
&#62; 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP.<p>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大约 12 年前
Haha this is great. Funny stuff, well done.
antimora大约 12 年前
This is probably more accurate history: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_language...</a><p>and this is a good book on programming languages in general: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-Sebesta/dp/0131395319" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-Robert-...</a>
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