An absolute classic. One of my favourite parts:
1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.
Oh, this is hilarious!
1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java’s novelty.
2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.
Extra fun fact for comment reading friends: This post is the origin of the meme “Monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors. What’s the problem?” Source
I’d like to see an update for typescript, go, rust.
2007 - Rob Pike and Ken Thompson think it would be really cool if C was more like Java, and that it would be even more cool if it used the Pascal-style “x := 5” syntax. They lock themselves in a dark room over the winter and create Go. People criticize it for not being more like Rust, despite Rust not having been invented yet.
2009 - After an airplane crash leaves Graydon Hoare stranded in the middle of the Arabian desert, a mysterious camel appears and saves his life. He creates Rust, and adds obtuse syntax and a merciless compiler to mimic the feeling of being stranded in the desert. Masochists worldwide rejoice.
2012 - Anders Hejlsberg discovers some mushrooms growing from the base of his bathtub. After consuming them, he has a revelation that C# needs more Javascript. He invents Typescript. Typescript is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds Typescript’s novelty.
Very amusing :'D Pretty sure Go actually was criticized for not being more like Rust pretty early on… maybe that’s an artifact of being around the sorts of nerds who knew about it before it really got outside of Mozilla.
