Every single joke in this paper is pure gold, but just for the sake of
remembering the golds here are some of them...
[...] 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.
[...] 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.
[...] 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.
[...] 1986 - 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." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic.
[...] 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip
Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates
Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance
due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to
appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of
endofunctors, what's the problem?"
[...] 1995 - At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that
his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding 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.