A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)
The article humorously chronicles the history of programming languages from the early 1800s to the 1980s. It highlights key figures and their contributions, often with a satirical twist. The narrative illustrates the evolution of programming languages while poking fun at their complexities and the criticisms they faced.
- ▪Joseph Marie Jacquard used punch cards in 1801 to instruct a loom, marking an early form of programming.
- ▪Ada Lovelace wrote the first program in 1842, despite lacking actual computers to execute her code.
- ▪In 1972, Dennis Ritchie invented the C programming language, which became foundational for many subsequent languages.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Blogspot |
| Canonical URL | http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 06:24:40 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T06:42:07.233Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T06:42:07.233Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Tuy3ZopZxJRe |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.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.1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Blogspot.
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