Programming History
I’ve been reading a book about the development of early programming languages. I was surprised to learn how many features of modern languages where first developed in Algol (circa 1960). It was also a little weird seeing a forerunner of C#’s using statement (“imports” in VB.NET) in Ada. It’s eye-opening to realize that features you take for granite where new ideas at one point. They’ve been refined over the years to the state that we know them now.