100 Fun Random Facts About Computer Programming

1. The first high-level programming language was Fortran. It was developed in the 1950s by IBM for scientific computation.
2. The name Python, a popular high-level programming language, doesn’t refer to the snake. It was named after the British comedy series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” by its creator, Guido van Rossum.
3. JavaScript was created in just 10 days by Brendan Eich in 1995. Despite its name, it has no real relation to Java.
4. Java, a popular object-oriented language, was initially called Oak. It was later renamed as Java after Java coffee, which is said to have been consumed in large quantities by its creators.
5. Despite the common misconception, HTML is not a programming language; it’s a markup language used for web page design.
6. The first programmer in history was a woman named Ada Lovelace, who worked on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.
7. The C language was so influential that it led to the creation of both Python and JavaScript, along with many other languages.
8. There is a language called INTERCAL, designed to be as different from traditional programming languages as possible. It has commands like “PLEASE” and “IGNORE” and lacks common commands like “AND” and “OR”.
9. The creators of the C++ language decided to call it “C++” as a play on the increment operator in C (C++ translates to “increment C by 1”).
10. SQL, which stands for Structured Query Language, isn’t a traditional programming language, but it’s essential for managing and querying databases.
11. A programming language named “Whitespace” was created as a joke for April Fool’s Day. The entire language only uses whitespace characters: space, tab, and return.
12. Lisp, one of the oldest high-level programming languages still in use today, was developed in 1958. Its name stands for “LISt Processing language”.
13. Despite being known as a low-level language, Assembly is not just one language, but a group of languages.
14. There is a programming language called “LOLCODE” designed to look like lolcats memes.
15. The R programming language, widely used by statisticians and data miners, is named after its creators, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman.
16. Swift, a programming language developed by Apple, was named as a nod to its speed of execution.
17. Go, a programming language developed by Google, was named after the ancient Chinese board game.
18. There’s a programming language called Brainfuck designed to challenge and amuse programmers, being as minimalistic as possible. It has only eight simple commands.
19. There’s a programming language called Shakespeare that makes the code read like a Shakespearean play.
20. COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, is a veteran language developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s that’s still in use in many financial and business applications.
21. Python was selected as the “most wanted” language by developers for the fourth year in a row in Stack Overflow’s 2020 survey.
22. C# (pronounced “C sharp”) is a language developed by Microsoft. Its name is a musical reference, indicating it’s a step up from C.
23. Perl was originally named “Pearl”. The creator, Larry Wall, wanted to give the language a short, easily searchable name, but ‘Pearl’ was already taken by another language.
24. The Ruby programming language was named by its creator after the gemstone, following the tradition set by Perl.
25. There is a programming language called Chef, where programs look like cooking recipes.
26. ALGOL, or Algorithmic Language, greatly influenced many other languages, including Pascal, C, and Java.
27. Julia is a relatively new language that was created to fill the need for a high-level language that could match the performance of traditional low-level languages.
28. Shell scripting, using languages like Bash, is often used for automating tasks on UNIX and Linux systems.
29. PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page”. Now it stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, a recursive acronym.
30. There is a programming language called “Piet” where the code looks like an abstract painting.
31. Scala, a modern language designed to address some of Java’s shortcomings, has its name derived from the word ‘scalable’, indicating it’s designed for large systems.
32. The most lines of code ever written for a single project is considered to be in Google’s repository, which held over 2 billion lines as of 2015.
33. In JavaScript, NaN stands for ‘Not a Number’, but the interesting part is that typeof NaN will return ‘number’.
34. Kotlin, a modern language for Android app development, was named after an island near St. Petersburg, Russia.
35. Haskell, a functional programming language, is named after the logician Haskell Curry.
36. Groovy was named as such because its creators wanted to convey that the language makes Java more flexible and easy-to-use.
37. Elixir is a functional, concurrent language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine and is used for building scalable applications.
38. TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript developed by Microsoft, adds optional static typing to the language.
39. Lua, a lightweight language often used for scripting in games, is Portuguese for “moon”.
40. Ada, a language used in aviation and defense, was named after Ada Lovelace.
41. Rust, a system programming language, was named after a fungus that is robust, distributed, and parallel, just like the language itself.
42. Prolog, or Programming in Logic, is associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics.
43. Erlang is a functional programming language used for creating highly concurrent and fault-tolerant systems. It was named after the Danish mathematician and engineer A.K. Erlang.
44. F#, a functional-first language developed by Microsoft, uses the musical sharp symbol in its name to imply it’s a “sharp” version of the functional programming concept.
45. Clojure, a functional language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, gets its name as a clever combination of “closure”, a key concept in functional languages, and “Java”.
46. Dart, developed by Google, was designed to make it easier to build more complex, high-performance apps for the web.
47. Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, initially named the language “C with Classes”.
48. The “K” in K&R C, the earliest standardized version of C, stands for Brian Kernighan, who co-wrote “The C Programming Language” book with Dennis Ritchie.
49. The first “Hello, World!” program, a simple program that outputs “Hello, World!” to the screen, was written in B, the precursor to C.
50. Fortran, which stands for “Formula Translation”, was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering calculations.
51. MATLAB, widely used by engineers and scientists, stands for “Matrix Laboratory”.
52. Pascal, a procedural language, was named in honor of the French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal.
53. Despite being over 60 years old, Assembly language is still used today in specific areas such as firmware, and performance-critical code.
54. Scratch, a programming language developed by MIT, is used predominantly by children and beginners to learn the basics of programming through visual blocks.
55. VHDL, or VHSIC Hardware Description Language, is used in electronic design automation to describe digital and mixed-signal systems.
56. Verilog is another hardware description language used to model electronic systems.
57. The iconic video game DOOM was largely written in C, with a little bit of Assembly.
58. ActionScript is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform.
59. Smalltalk, an object-oriented language, was so influential that it introduced the term “bytecode”.
60. Icon is a high-level programming language that’s known for its strong support of string scanning and pattern matching.
61. APL, or “A Programming Language”, is unique in that it uses a non-standard character set, including many Greek letters.
62. BASIC, which stands for “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”, was designed in 1964 to help students learn programming.
63. The general-purpose language ALGOL was widely used in Europe and was the standard method for algorithm description used by ACM.
64. Simula, developed in the 1960s, was the first object-oriented programming language.
65. BCPL, or Basic Combined Programming Language, was an influential language in the 1960s that informed the development of C.
66. In 1972, Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs writes C and develops the first Unix operating system in C.
67. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which helped astronauts land on the moon, was programmed using Assembly language.
68. The first versions of Microsoft Windows were written in Assembly.
69. Lisp, apart from being one of the oldest high-level programming languages in use, is also the second-oldest high-level language in widespread use today, only Fortran is older.
70. Grace Hopper, a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, created the first compiler for a programming language and was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she is also often credited with popularizing the term “debugging”.
71. The term “bug” in programming is often attributed to a story about a moth being discovered in an early computer, causing problems. The log book, with the moth taped to the page, is in the Smithsonian.
72. Edsger Dijkstra, the famous computer scientist, once said, “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in”.
73. There’s a saying in the programming world: “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”.
74. The popular web framework Ruby on Rails was named as a pun on “Python on Platforms”.
75. Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute – this famous quote by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman explains the importance of code readability.
76. Bill Gates wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for the first microcomputer – the MITS Altair.
77. Assembly language and machine language are the only languages that a computer can understand and execute directly.
78. Ada, one of the first high-level programming languages, was developed in the mid-1800s. Ada Lovelace is credited with creating it, making her the world’s first programmer.
79. There’s a saying in the programming world, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” – Linus Torvalds
80. In 1983, the programming language Ada was named after Ada Lovelace. It’s used in systems where reliability and efficiency are crucial, such as traffic control and aviation.
81. The term “programming” was used before the advent of electronic computers to describe the process of setting up and operating industrial machines, such as looms.
82. The first known computer program was written by a woman. Ada Lovelace wrote an algorithm intended to be processed by the first modern computer, the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage.
83. The Commodore 64, an 8-bit home computer introduced in 1982, was shipped with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a version of the BASIC programming language built into the ROM.
84. C++, an extension of the C language, was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup; it’s a hybrid language that allows procedural and object-oriented programming.
85. COBOL, a programming language created in 1959, stands for “Common Business-Oriented Language.” Despite being criticized for being outdated, a significant amount of legacy software still uses COBOL, and it remains an active language for certain business applications.
86. In 2000, Sun released Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), a version of the language tailored for embedded systems and mobile devices.
87. The “Java” name in JavaScript has caused a lot of confusion. JavaScript was initially named Mocha, then renamed to LiveScript, and finally to JavaScript when Netscape and Sun did a license agreement.
88. PHP, a popular scripting language, was initially created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to track visits to his online resume. It originally stood for “Personal Home Page.”
89. Python’s design philosophy emphasizes code readability and ease of use. Its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than might be possible in languages such as C++ or Java.
90. The first functional programming language was LISP, which stands for “LISt Processing.” It was developed by John McCarthy in 1958 and was quickly adopted for artificial intelligence (AI) research.
91. Ruby, a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented programming language, was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto in Japan.
92. Swift, a programming language developed by Apple for iOS and macOS app development, was introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2014. It was created to be easier to learn and use than Objective-C.
93. Typescript, a statically typed superset of JavaScript, was developed by Microsoft to tackle the shortcomings of JavaScript for the development of large-scale applications.
94. “Perl” is said to stand for “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language,” though this has been described as a backronym. It was originally a Unix scripting tool to make report processing easier.
95. Python is a multi-paradigm programming language. It supports structured, object-oriented, and functional programming patterns.
96. Shell scripting languages are used to automate commands on Unix and Unix-like operating systems.
97. Kotlin, a statically typed programming language from JetBrains, is officially supported by Google for mobile app development on Android.
98. JavaScript, despite its name, has nothing to do with Java. It was named this way to leverage the popularity of Java at the time of JavaScript’s creation.
99. C was initially developed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system by Dennis Ritchie.
100. ArnoldC is a programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The basic keywords are replaced by quotes like “TALK TO THE HAND” for ‘print’ and “YOU HAVE BEEN TERMINATED” for ‘end’.

Originally posted 2023-09-21 18:37:50.

Please share this page on social media and help us grow!