We were sitting with a programming assignment due for demonstration at nine the following morning in our Syntax Analysis course.

You were allowed to do pretty much whatever you wanted as long as it involved lexical and syntactical analysis.

We started making up some great ideas, the kind you only conceive of when you really should be asleep.
We have no idea why, but that night we were also thinking about Shakespeare in general, and Shakespearian insults in particular and three hours later we had come up with this amazing idea: the Shakespeare Programming Language, SPL.