roomthily

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

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.

1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term “object oriented.” When asked what that means he replies, “Smalltalk programs are just objects.” When asked what objects are made of he replies, “objects.” When asked again he says “look, it’s all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.”

1995 - At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding both the World Wide Web and that web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day.

via One Div Zero