An article entitled A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages offers a very humorous glimpse into the world of programming. My absolute favorite snippet from the article:
1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.
It's funny because it's true. (Hat tip to Dustin for the pointer to this article.)