An Interesting Analysis of the History of Visual Basic and C

For those that read me that are NOT computer geeks... this won't be as funny as it is to those who are...

History of the BASIC family of languages

And just a few items from it:

1964 – A pair of instructors at Dartmouth College decide they have a group of students too lazy to learn FORTRAN. They produce a new language with only 26 variable names, so that even a lazy programmer can keep track of them. . . . 1974 – Star Trek games make up 82% of all programs written in BASIC on DEC time-sharing systems, and consume 99% of available CPU time. Players of the game learn the concept of an infinite loop when the game begins to endlessly repeat “Attempt to break contact. Contact not broken. Klingon attempt to break contact. Contact not broken…” . . . 2005 – Microsoft releases Visual Basic 2005, which contains a wizard to generate code for a fully functional Star Trek game.

And not to let C get away without some fun, here is the

History of the C family of languages

and a few items from it:

1972 - The precursor to C, the language B, is developed at Bell Labs. The B language is fast, easy to maintain, and useful for all kinds of development from systems to applications. The entire team that designed the language is immediately fired for behavior unbefitting a telephone company employee, and the project is handed to Dennis Ritchie. He alters the language to be incomprehensible, difficult to maintain, and only useful for systems development. He also designs in a pointer system guaranteed to give every program over 500 lines a pointer into the operating system.
. . .
1985 – A variant of C with object oriented capabilities, called C With Classes, is ready to go commercial. However, the name C With Classes is considered too clear and easy for outsiders to understand, so the commercial version is called C++.
. . .
2002 – C# is introduced as part of the release version of Microsoft .NET. C++ developers on the Microsoft platform rejoice over the concept of “managed code”, which means they finally receive the same automatic memory management features that Visual Basic has had since 1991 and Java has had since 1995.

Read the whole thing to really enjoy it. Very very funny.

Posted by vw bug at May 19, 2006 01:07 PM | TrackBack