Cast your mind way, way back, to the Dark Ages of personal computing. 
Children like me sat at home playing with a Sinclare Spectrum or a 
Commodore 64 - great chunks of grey plastic which load files from audio 
cassette (remember those?), and produce blocky 16-colour graphics. All 
of these machines are powered by low-end 8-bit microprocessors clokced 
at around 1MHz, they have a few KB of RAM, and they each have a ROM 
containing a BASIC interpretter of varying sophistication which also 
doubles as a kind of Disk Operating System. (Not that anybody *has* 
disks yet...)

It is a sobering thought to realise that as children like me sat at 
home, glibly typing in the source code listings from computer magazines 
(remember those?), PostScript had just been released, SQL was 5 years 
old, C was 10 years old, Smalltalk was almost 15 years old, and BASIC 
itself was already 20 years old. The mighty Lisp was over 25 years old 
already. And just a few years later, C++ was invented.

When the C64 was designed, extremely powerful languages such as List, 
Prolog, Smalltalk and even Pascal were already decades old. And yet, the 
C64 came with... BASIC?

Even as Borland released TurboPascal 5.5 for DOS [that's the one with 
the object-oriented extensions which aren't actually object-oriented], 
Eiffel, Erlang and Miranda already existed. (Miranda is the [proprietry] 
language which eventually gave rise to Haskell.) And Haskell 1.0 itself 
was formalised only a year or two after TP 5.5 came out. For MS-DOS. (!)

Have a look at the attached chart. (Excel was less than helpful in 
producing this, BTW.) There are several interesting anomolies:

- C and Prolog appeared at the same time. This doesn't make a lot of 
sense. C is a crude, simplistic low-level bit-twiddling langauge, while 
Prolog is a powerful high-level logic manipulation language. If there 
were computers capable of running Prolog, why did C need to exist?

- Pascal predates C, and yet C fails to incorporate almost any of the 
good ideas from Pascal.

- Smalltalk was doing OOP before home computers were even *invented*, 
and yet it wasn't until 20 _years_ later that commercial products like 
TP 5.5 and Delphi started to take the idea mainstream.

- SQL existed 15 years before high-capacity storage devices appeared. 
(This is worse than it appears. You wouldn't even realise that a 
language like SQL was *necessary* unless databases themselves had 
already existed for some considerable length of time. And after that 
there would obviously be a rash of incompatible proprietry languages 
until people decided to design a standardised one.)

- PostScript was invented 10 years before laser printers existed. (It 
was apparently designed specifically with laser printers in mind, as I 
had always believed.)

- That splodge next to it is C++ and Ada. They were apparently invented 
at the same time. And yet, 10 years later, nobody had heard of C++ yet.

- Haskell was invented back when people were still using green screens 
and MS-DOS. It brings a slight chill to my spine to know that way back 
when I was still coding with AMOS Professional, minds immeasurably 
superior to ours had already constructed the most powerful programming 
language known.

- Perl predates the Internet by half a decade. (WTF?) I can only imagine 
it began life as a Unixy text-munging system in the style of awk, sed, etc.

- JavaScript predates Java. (WTF?!)

- Visual Basic is significantly older than Delphi.

- Ruby, PHP and JavaScript were all around at the same time as Delphi. 
This is puzzling because when Delphi was new, the Internet didn't really 
"exist" yet.

- C# (by which I denote the entire zoo of .NET languages) is the only 
thing in the chart to have been invented this millennium.

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