Objects all the way down to the turtles
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James Iry, who ought to know, has written "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages". I don't believe that there's anything similar for natural languages, although John Cowan's "Essentialist Explanations" offers a wealth of raw material.
The start of it all:
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.
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.
1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.
1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
[Hat tip to Fernando Pereira.]
Bobbie said,
May 9, 2010 @ 6:01 pm · Edit
1990-something: Al Gore invents the Internet. He also invents a lot of computer languages that are never used by anyone. But he brags about them!
[This is one of the two or three most successful political lies of the past 30-40 years. In the first place, Gore never claimed to have invented the internet; in the second place, he actually did promote the development of the internet as senator in the late 1980s and as vice president in the early 1990s, so that what he did say about his role was accurate. If we had a press corps with any collective intelligence or integrity, this little nugget of misinformation would never have achieved its urban-legend status.
A better way to turn this into a joke would be to satirize the origin and progress of the canard, rather than simply replicating it.
(Note: Various people have pointed out to me that this comment may have been intended ironically, and thus passed right over my head. As a result, I've toned down my response, while retaining the basic content.)]
dl said,
May 9, 2010 @ 6:32 pm · Edit
wow, with rebuttals like that why would anyone comment
(ok, give it your best shot, there was a curious lack of tail call recursion or concurrency in your previous epistle.)
[(myl) Well, I thought about just deleting the previous comment, rather than commenting on it. But the tendency to associate every political figure with a single stereotyped falsehood is worth opposing, I think. And most of our commenters are insightful and worth reading, whether or not I agree with what they have to say.]
(Update: as noted above, I may have failed to grasp the commenter's intended irony. I'm still not very happy about jokes that simply replicate dismissive falsehoods of this kind, but I shouldn't assume meanings that may not have been there.)]
Mr Fnortner said,
May 9, 2010 @ 7:14 pm · Edit
I would say the Bobbie has struck a nerve. Al Gore needs no defense from linguists. And Bobbie's jibe speaks for itself. It would have been better to have left it there like a dead skunk in the road than to put flowers and a cross beside it.
While no one here needs an explanation of the Internet, it suffices to say that a) work on the Internet dates back 40 years or more, most of it in the first two decades by DARPA and other institutions only vaguely associated with Al Gore, if at all, b) by the time of Sen. Gore's 1991 bill that led to substantial government support for a technology infrastructure, the Internet as we know it had been operational for eight years, c) Sen. Gore's actual quote is: "…I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
It is worth noting that Mr. Gore was 20 years old when the network to become the Internet was conceived, and his initiative was nowhere near it. The communications technology of this network was nearly ten years old when Mr. Gore went to Congress. Yet, it is not a hard stretch to understand "took the initiative in creating" to be equivalent of "invented," especially for those who had spent their full adult lives in that technology and had just heard of Sen. Gore about the time he made his comment. "Who?" and "Did what?" were typical responses.
So maybe we all agree that Sen. Gore did not invent the Internet, and to that extent Bobbie is incorrect. But Sen. Gore left himself wide open for criticism with such a self-aggrandizing comment. I'd say any continuing echo of this false meme is still well deserved.
Dan Lufkin said,
May 9, 2010 @ 7:14 pm · Edit
I can testify to the correctness of that quash. The VP's office practically kidnapped a bunch of our best programmers in NOAA (we ran three of the ten biggest computers in the country at the time) and put them to work retooling ARPANET for civilian use. He was also holding the Air Force's head in the toilet until they finally cooperated. Things got pretty tense, but Gore stuck it out. We (NOAA) bitched and moaned, but things turned out better than we thought.
What's interesting a generation later is the laserlike focus of the climate-change "skeptics" on Gore. Anything Al is for, they're against. Patellar reflex. Poor guy!
giotto said,
May 9, 2010 @ 7:23 pm · Edit
I was pretty certain I was reading satire as I read that first comment. Then the belabored response from hour host had me reconsider. Now I'm reconsidering my reconsideration. The thing is that the mere replication of stupid talking points is not always without critical intent. Think of "Michael Moore is fat" as a comment-thread summation of (stereotypical) right-wing idiocy. I do believe I have seen "Al Gore invented the internet" used in the same way, and such a comment would be perfectly appropriate in the context of a post dealing with things that are mostly wrong. Given that, and given the tone of the post, I'd say the generous response is to not assume that Bobbie is Less Bright Than We Are.
giotto said,
May 9, 2010 @ 7:25 pm · Edit
Sorry. "our host." gads.
Mark P said,
May 9, 2010 @ 7:58 pm · Edit
What's interesting a generation later is the laserlike focus of the climate-change "skeptics" on Gore.
Interesting use of scare quotes. I take it all climate-change "skeptics" are, in your opinion, merely masquerading as such.
I think you can at least give some of them the benefit of having an honest opinion, misguided or not.
John Cowan said,
May 9, 2010 @ 8:12 pm · Edit
Bits of this post are now in Essentialist Explanations, down near the end.
Penn Student said,
May 9, 2010 @ 9:01 pm · Edit
Maybe it is time to update the comment policy. I personally think that Bobbie was being funny (or even funny in a stupid way) but that did not warrant such a harsh response from the host of this blog.
[(myl) You might be right. Harshness duly reduced somewhat.]
On a lighter note, is the award for the BS comment of the year still open?? :P
[(myl) Yes, I think we should treat this as an individual record, like points scored in a basketball game, that is always available to be broken.]
John McIntyre said,
May 9, 2010 @ 10:14 pm · Edit
If the comment by Bobbie was meant to be satirical, it was inept. If it was meant seriously, it merits a response harsher than the one it got.
Sili said,
May 9, 2010 @ 10:26 pm · Edit
Yes. Hence the "skeptics" rather than skeptics. Personally I've come to prefer denialists.
And of course Al Gore invented the Internet! If he hadn't, how would he spread his Global Warming lies? Not to mention his poor understanding of Chinese?
Ben said,
May 10, 2010 @ 12:00 am · Edit
I thought Bobbie's post was obviously satire, and a good way of mocking the people who believe it and state it as truth (and I do believe those people deserve mocking). It was not inept satire either…it fell right in with the pattern of the post–a time-sequential series of false statements about famous people and technological innovations, while also conforming to the pattern of common ignorant discourse, a clever combination.
I honestly don't see how anyone could it interpret Bobbie's comment in this context as anything *but* satire.
In any case, I think the red-ink response was completely inappropriate and even mean-spirited. What would have been appropriate as a red-ink response would be the simple facts (as stated) to inform anyone that had been unaware this was a myth, but without the ill-will towards Bobbie.
[(myl) You might well be right. And in response to this and other suggestions, I've edited my response in the direction of greater civility.
In my defense: actively spreading falsehoods of this kind is a Bad Thing; and it's not hard, these days, to learn the truth about them. And if you're going to mock the people who spread such stories by pretending to be one of them, you need to think about how likely you are to be taken literally. A dead-pan joke about how the earth is flat is likely to work; a similar joke about Gore and the internet probably won't, unless your audience knows you pretty well, because some quite large fraction of the population believes those stories.]
mitcho said,
May 10, 2010 @ 12:04 am · Edit
This reminds me of the McCawley (1978): "Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists": http://specgram.com/LP/10.mccawley.may.html