Circulating the nerd-o-sphere at the moment: A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

This stuff is pure gold. Some examples:

1940s – Various “computers” are “programmed” using direct wiring and switches. Engineers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

…

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

…

1995 – At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding both the World Wide Web and that web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day.

It’s great, however the languages we love and hate (CFML and ASP, in case you weren’t paying attention) are not included. I think we should come up with something in that style. Can someone think up some entries for these two? Leave a comment!