1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
An absolute classic. One of my favourite parts:
1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.
2012 - Anders Hejlsberg discovers some mushrooms growing from the base of his bathtub. After consuming them, he has a revelation that C# needs more Javascript. He invents Typescript. Typescript is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds Typescript's novelty.
Very amusing :'D Pretty sure Go actually was criticized for not being more like Rust pretty early on... maybe that's an artifact of being around the sorts of nerds who knew about it before it really got outside of Mozilla.