History of the C family of languages
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.
1982 – It is discovered that 97% of all C routine calls are subject to buffer overrun exploits. C programmers begin to realize that initializing a variable to whatever happens to be lying around in memory is not necessarily a good idea. However, since enforcing sensible variable initialization would break 97% of all C programs in existence, nothing is done about it.
1984 – The number of operating systems bad pointers can get to has been dramatically increased.
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++.
1986 – C becomes so popular that industry analysts recommend writing business applications in it. They argue that applications written in C will be portable to many different systems. Many of these industry analysts are suspected of being under the influence of hallucinogens.
1988 – Industry analysts finally run out of LSD. After their hallucinations fade, they notice that business apps written in C take five times longer to produce, and are still not portable. They stop recommending that business apps be written in C, except for a minority that switch to crack cocaine and start recommending business apps be written in C++ because “object orientation will result in code reuse”.
1990 – By this time, all C compilers have turned into C++ compilers. But, since most C++ programs do not use any of the object oriented features of the language, this means in practical terms that bloated code structures with pointers into the operating system are now being compiled with an object-oriented compiler.
1990 – After hiring some industry analysts that switched from crack to sniffing glue, Sun decides to create a language called Oak to program set-top television boxes. Since all their programmers have had stilted C syntax imprinted into their DNA by this time, the new language borrows heavily from C and C++ syntax. However the set-top boxes don’t have an operating system for bad pointers to get to, so pointers are eliminated from the language.
1994 – Someone at Sun finally realizes what a stupid idea it was to develop a special language just for set-top television boxes. The language is renamed Java and repositioned as an “Internet” language that is supposed to be portable to many platforms. This works well as a marketing campaign, since less than 3% of people in the industry at this time realize what the Internet is, and since hallucinating industry analysts continue to be suckers for the mythical idea of "portability to different platforms".
1995 - Sun offers free psychedelic mushrooms to industry analysts, who immediately start writing articles about how Java is the future of programming because of its portability and integration with the Internet.
Mid 1996 – 17,468,972 articles appear about how Java is the future of programming. The age of Java applets in web pages begins.
Late 1996 – Programmers trying to produce actual web pages with applets that really work commit mass suicide out of frustration and depression. Industry analysts increase their dosage of hallucinogens to compensate.
1997 – Taking the advice of hallucinating industry analysts, Corel decides to rewrite all their applications, including WordPerfect, in Java. The end result is the first known word processor that is slower to use than a typewriter.
1998 – Realizing that the applet thing is fading fast, Sun repositions Java again, this time as a server language. They steal the design of Microsoft Transaction Server and convince everyone to pretend they created the design.
1999 – Java 2 Enterprise Edition is introduced to the rave reviews of drunk and stoned industry analysts. 21,499,512 articles are written about it, but no one actually uses it because it’s immature and expensive.
2000 – J2EE finally works, sort of. Just about the time all the Java vendors are ready to start making money on it, Microsoft announces .NET, which includes almost all the features of J2EE except the outrageous cost. In fact, Microsoft decides to give .NET away free for Windows users. Scott McNealy is so outraged he files another irrational lawsuit against Microsoft.
.NET includes a new C-family language, C#, pronounced “C-pound”, continuing the tradition of languages in this family having stupid names.
2001 – Microsoft’s marketing department realizes that no one in marketing has ever talked to a live Microsoft product developer. They have lunch with one and discover that the pronunciation is actually supposed to be “C sharp”.
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.
copyright (C) 1996-2006 by Billy S. Hollis, originally posted on dotnetmasters.com 13 January 2006
Please do not remove this copyright message
See also the History of the Basic Family and the History of the Microprocessor