A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)
I like this. I like this a lot. I think far too often people take the concepts we study too seriously. Things get challenging, things get precise, but the moment the humor leaves, the creativity is gone.Think of how easy it would be to learn something if you make a joke every 5 minutes while learning it (about the subject). In your mind, you turned this abstract concept into something else, something funny, something with pathways and connections that weren't expected. You manipulated it, changed it, saw it in a new light. When you were trying to find humor, you created pathways to other things that you thought were similar. You already connected the object in your brain before you knew where it fit, just by trying to find humor in it.The really, really good ideas are the ones that almost sound like jokes, but there's an ever so slight hint of severity to them.Edit: I think I missed the point I was trying to make. Give this to a freshman computer science student. They get to read a fun story. Instead of an intense debate about which language is the best for thing X, or being forced to learn language Y, they get an overview of the entire history, with some cheeky humor that they can remember when they find a bit of truth, or a bit of false, in this story. I will bet they remember this thing better than a 300 page book dedicated to all of the subtle differences between the languages. Plus, they might laugh and enjoy what they're doing.