The history of programming: lecture by Douglas Crockford

[Jackolantern]

I highly suggest if you have an interest in programming to check out Douglas Crockford's Yahoo! lecture on The Early Days of Programming. Crockford is world renown as an expert of Javascript, and is known for creating and popularizing many of the object-oriented patterns for JS. This was his lead-in lecture for a several part series on JS, but this part is not language-specific, and instead starts at the very first object that could be considered "programmable", the Jacquard loom, and works up to modern day, with a focus on what the life of each programmer was like through the ages. Crockford himself got started in the pre-mainframe days of early punch cards, so he has first-hand experience with much of this history. I highly recommend it!

As kind of a sampling of what I found out in this lecture, is where the term "spaghetti code" came from and why it was so accurate, where the terms "batch" and "submit a job" came from, where the term "bug" came from, why we have both a backspace and a delete button, and more. Fun stuff for coding nerds lol!

Then if you are a Javascript programmer, I suggest to search out the rest of the series on YouTube and watch the language specific stuff. This man is a master of JS, and known as one of the people who brought it to popularity (and sanity) during the AJAX explosion.