I’ve been bumping into Billy Hollis at developer events for the last ten years. Last time I saw him, we were riding in a taxi in Sydney Australia with a tremendous thunderstorm raging outside the cab. If you know Billy, you know that he was telling stories — funny and profound, all the way back to the hotel.
Well, he’s still spinning stories, and he’s got a couple of funny ones up on his website. Both are pure gold, here a few excerpts.
History of the BASIC family of languages.
1964 – A pair of instructors at Dartmouth College decide they have a group of students too lazy to learn FORTRAN. They produce a new language with only 26 variable names, so that even a lazy programmer can keep track of them.
1966 – The creators of BASIC decide it will never have any commercial application since students too lazy to learn FORTRAN can’t possibly write anything of value. They place the language in the public domain…Billy Hollis – Funny History of C and BASIC
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…