"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."

LOL.

"This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been 
invented."

Hmm... how true.

"Lisp remains an influential language in 'key algorithmic techniques 
such as recursion and condescension'."

That would by funny if it wasn't true. ;-)

"Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them 
popular by not having them."

ROFL. WIN!

"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."

0wned.

"1972 - Alain Colmerauer designs the logic language Prolog. His goal is 
to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves 
he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says "No." to 
every query."

THIS IS THE WIN!

"Look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles."

...WTF?

"1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the 
keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters 
on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a 
programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. 
Perl is born."

I *knew* it!

"1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip 
Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals 
creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets 
some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side 
effects."

...which is interesting, given that monads were added about a decade 
after the language itself was specified. :-P

"A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

I can believe that. *sigh*

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