OK, so I had no quirkier suggestions and I guess you can all deal with a geeky bit of fun… James Iry has put together “a brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages” over on his blog.
A particular highlight that will be of interest to our colleagues working with Micro Focus:
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.
I also particularly liked, having to study it at University, the description of ML:
1973 – Robin Milner creates ML, a language based on the M&M type theory. ML begets SML which has a formally specified semantics. When asked for a formal semantics of the formal semantics Milner’s head explodes. Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.
I suspect few people might question the definition of this as fun, but what they hey.
Via qwghlm.
Chivalry House 