Wapsi Square Forum

Had to pass this on:

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Samples:

1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There's nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.

1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

1983 - In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran, Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming language. In spite of the lack of evidence that any significant Ada program is ever completed historians believe Ada to be a successful public works project that keeps several thousand roving defense contractors out of gangs.

Excellent! Especially fun reading for those fond of skin diseases!

FORTRAN is the language in which I once successfully demonstrated (for classroom credit!) that 1+2=5. I figured out that the school's Univac FORTRAN compiler had a wee little bug in it If you passed a numeric constant as a parameter to a function, and the function modified its parameter, this would alter the (writeable) memory location in which the compiler had stored the constant... and subsequent calculations made using that same constant would produce incorrect results.

Hence, I demonstrated one of the classic laws of computing: "All constants are variable" (or "Constants aren't" if you prefer).

For those conversant with the history of C and Unix - Kate once worked with a guy who had a loose-leaf copy of K&R.