Is that supposed to be a joke? Java isn't remotely close to being the first strongly-typed or even the first statically-typed language.
(Of course, C has its void pointers for the same purpose...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplis...
"Babbage was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1832.[35] In 1837, responding to the Bridgewater Treatises, of which there were eight, he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation, putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book is a work of natural theology, and incorporates extracts from correspondence he had been having with John Herschel on the subject."
I have a related story. When I was younger I thought that in order to properly understand Buddhism I must learn Tibetan language and then read "original" books. Later I have discovered that the right books are written in Sanskrit.) Thank goodness I've abandoned the idea.
If you take a modern translation of a Tibetan Buddhist text you will find tons of metaphors, language ornaments, stories upon stories, comments upon comments, and comments about comments about stories. This absolutely is not meant to be accessible by anyone.)) Lots of people are convinced that this is Buddhism.
There are thousands of people who spend their lives arguing why such and such ornamentation in Tibetan iconography has such and such color, why this or that deity must be depicted this or that way, and which arrangement of symbols in what order must represent this or that realm.
All this has absolutely nothing to do with teaching of the Buddha and the best way to learn it is by reading a few (definitely more than one) profound teachers.
All these connections seem tenuous to me, so what's one more? Why not say Diogenes was the first Lisp-programmer philosopher? After all, he had it right, but was ignored for years.
I would rather consider programming paradigms to be better equivalents for "different philosophies".
edit oh, and I had the pleasure of reading (only bits) from Ray Monk's bio of W. (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.ht...), which is frequently referred to in SEP's article on W. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/) - it might make for a very nice introductory exposition, if you're up for actually reading a (not-too-thin) book about him.
