Satirical Timeline: From Jacquard Loom to JavaScript

Warning: The original content may contain fictional or exaggerated statements.

Warning: Non‑bold text is added by the translator for readability and may not be accurate.

For those lacking a sense of humor, Wikipedia has a topic titled “History of programming languages”.

1801 – Joseph Marie Jacquard programmed a loom with punched cards, weaving “hello, world” on a tapestry. This early programmable machine introduced the concept of using punched cards for programming.

Jacquard’s loom was the first program‑controlled loom; punched‑card programming persisted into early computers.

The earliest “Hello World” program (from K&R C) printed the lowercase string “hello, world”.

Incorrect case usage in English‑language tech communities is often seen as a novice mistake.

Typical Reddit/Hacker News title patterns and follow‑up questions illustrate ongoing language debates.

1842 – Ada Lovelace wrote what is considered the world’s first program, though no computer existed to run it; later architects cite her work when discussing UML.

Ada Lovelace implemented an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, earning her recognition as the first programmer.

The passage satirically criticises modern “software architects” who merely draw UML.

1936 – Alan Turing introduced the universal concept of program languages (the Turing machine), later working for British intelligence during WWII.

Languages equivalent to a universal Turing machine are called Turing‑complete, defining what constitutes a programming language.

Turing’s wartime code‑breaking work remained secret for many years.

1936 – Alonzo Church independently developed the λ‑calculus, providing the theoretical foundation for functional languages.

Church, Turing’s PhD advisor, proved the undecidability of certain problems, leading to the Church‑Turing thesis.

λ‑calculus underpins all modern functional programming languages.

1940s – Early computers used wiring and switches for program control, humorously avoiding debates over spaces versus tabs.

Engineers allegedly argued over indentation style (spaces vs tabs) and editor preferences (Vim vs Emacs, etc.).

They ultimately chose wiring and switches, “creating” the ENIAC.

1957 – John Backus and IBM created FORTRAN; early versions required strict formatting, such as blue ties for IBM staff.

FORTRAN 77 imposed rigid fixed‑format source code requirements.

1958 – John McCarthy and Paul Graham invented LISP, noted for its heavy use of parentheses and influence on recursion and functional programming.

Strategic parentheses reserves are a tongue‑in‑cheek reference to Cold‑War resource jokes.

1959 – Grace Hopper helped develop COBOL, a language known for its verbose, all‑caps style.

COBOL’s design emphasized business data processing.

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz created BASIC, aimed at non‑computer‑science users.

Basic’s line numbers and GOTO usage are often mocked.

1970 – Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman created Scheme, spawning a series of “Lambda the Ultimate” papers.

References to various “Lambda” papers and their humorous titles.

1970 – Niklaus Wirth created Pascal, criticized for its “:=” assignment syntax.

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invented C and Unix, while Alain Colmerauer designed Prolog.

Prolog’s goal was to emulate a two‑year‑old child’s intelligence.

1973 – Robin Milner created ML, leading to SML, OCaml, and influencing Visual Basic’s type inference.

1980 – Alan Kay invented Smalltalk and coined “object‑oriented”.

1983 – The Ada language was created for US defense projects.

1983 – Bjarne Stroustrup extended C to create C++.

1986 – Brad Cox and Tom Love created Objective‑C.

1987 – Larry Wall invented Perl after a “nap‑induced revelation”.

1990 – A committee including Simon Peyton‑Jones and others created Haskell, a pure functional language using monads.

1991 – Guido van Rossum created Python, promoting the “one‑right‑way” philosophy.

1995 – Rasmus Lerdorf invented PHP, embedding code directly in HTML.

1995 – Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto created Ruby, later popularised by Ruby on Rails.

1995 – Brendan Eich created LiveScript, later renamed JavaScript and standardised as ECMAScript.

1996 – James Gosling invented Java, a class‑based, garbage‑collected language.

2001 – Anders Hejlsberg created C#, another class‑based, garbage‑collected language.

2003 – Martin Odersky invented Scala, blending object‑oriented and functional paradigms.

Additional note: The original Jacquard loom supported concurrency and can be seen as an early multi‑threaded system.