50th Birthday Celebrations of Programming Languages

I did a quickie survey of 50th birthday celebrations for programming languages. I was disappointed to find very few legitimate events.

Now, obviously, only programming languages created before 1972 could have had 50th birthday celebrations, languages like FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, BASIC, and Pascal, to name the few living, prominent, surviving languages today.

For these, I found this event for FORTRAN: Fortran’s Fiftieth Birthday. Not exactly a big deal. No birthday banquet nor free swag that I could determine.

There was this event for LISP, but it was couched in a larger, general event: The Evolution of Lisp. Again, no birthday banquet nor free swag.

This was an okay event for BASIC: Anniversary Celebration Schedule. Not particularly impressive.

For the rest, some people published articles to celebrate the birthdays. Borrring.

Don’t major programming languages deserve real birthday celebrations? Maybe I’m being silly.

Will there be 50th birthday celebrations for C, Prolog, Ada?

Anyway, I invite people to attend the 50th birthday celebration for Smalltalk at Camp Smalltalk Supreme next year. It should be a real blast!