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Comment by f4stjack | Hacker News Reader

"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."

Hands down epic definition win.

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My favourite is actually:

    1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots
    both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied
    with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from
    that invention he invents C and Unix.

This was actually a remix[1] and nod to the legendary guide, "Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages,"[2] which has slowly evolved over the course of usenet, gopher, and websockets.

I'm convinced that this list will one day be fed recursively into a prolog console and become skynet.

1. http://blip.tv/goodiebag/everything-is-a-remix-part-1-413601... 2. http://www.toodarkpark.org/computers/humor/shoot-self-in-foo...

I think skynet is smarter then the average two year old though.

Nice one. I really liked this one though:

1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2].

[1] Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high.

[2] Catch as catch can - Verity Stob: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/11/exception_handling/

The wonderful thing about Lisp though is that you can write a macro to produce more parentheses! However, to do this you have to be able to write a macro.

You know what they say...it takes parentheses to make parentheses.

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?"

I don't know why, but this had me laughing uncontrollably:

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++.

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