4 ms·

List of 4,248 open source programming languages

79 points by mahmoudimus 5y ago

sigjuice 5y ago
The title is misleading. I don't see "open source" mentioned anywhere on this page. e.g. it is very unlikely that all the Basic variants listed here are open source.
- rsstack 5y ago
  There are languages you could write open-source applications with /s There are definitely proprietary languages on that list.
- tyingq 5y ago
  To be clear, the HN title is misleading. The page itself isn't claiming to list "open source" anything.
znpy 5y ago
The title is misleading. The list is about languages, of any kind, no matter if open source or not, or even if related to computing or not. So much so that some entries that initially appeared weird to me are: - morse code - arezzo notation (a musical notation system) - Balanced ternary Then you look better... and you realize it's about languages in general, not about open source or programming at all.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Weirdly, the list itself is shared source (visible, encouragement to fork & PR, no license to be seen)
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Not even just languages. atom-editor is not a language.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Some of them aren't even languages. Like another commenter mentioned, it's just a list of things. Which makes me wonder: why is it on HN
unfocused 5y ago
This list is very random. You can’t lump in musical notation from the year “1033” and call it programming. They need to pick a theme at least, to make this useful.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I could almost stretch my mind that far. You could kind of think of a song as a program, and the musical notation as the programming language, and the performance of the song as executing the program. Almost. It's sure not Turing complete, though...
ModernMech 5y ago
Super cool! This list is very comprehensive and includes languages that aren’t on many other lists. I’m wondering how the author collected all of these. I’ve been building a list of programming languages posted to HN in my favorites list — it’s fun because everyone has their own idea or angle on what a programming language should look like and what features it should have.
- __s 5y ago
  It's a bit off, plenty of not-a-programming-language entries, & it isn't comprehensive Anyways, if you want lots of silly languages https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list I'll list some languages I've implemented which aren't on this list: https://github.com/serprex/Rue https://github.com/serprex/Rue I implemented Rue based off of https://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue https://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue but with the idea to extend it with regex & modules https://github.com/serprex/oilrs https://github.com/serprex/oilrs https://esolangs.org/wiki/OIL https://esolangs.org/wiki/OIL someone shared an esolang they'd been implementing in Python, I decided to implement it in Rust. Making a second implementation made for good discussion, such as "how strict is integer format?" where it was decided 007 shouldn't be accepted, that empty cell vs empty-string cell being semantically different be kept, & the stdlib was moved to its own repo https://github.com/serprex/NULL https://github.com/serprex/NULL I decided to port https://esolangs.org/wiki/NULL https://esolangs.org/wiki/NULL to Rust. If there were more programs in NULL I'd consider digging for a faster bignum implementation Bonus: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Three_Star_Programmer https://esolangs.org/wiki/Three_Star_Programmer is an interesting one-instruction machine. One instruction is a neat space, a somewhat different dimension of minimalism from brainfuck, see also https://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot https://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot
dragonwriter 5y ago
They aren't consistently open source or programming languages (only categories “pl” and “esolang” seem to be programming languages.) It's a list of...things.
- mypalmike 5y ago
  Even among "pl", even a quick sampling shows that these aren't necessarily correctly categorized. For instance, "advice-taker" according to the site is "an actively used programming language created in 1958". But Wikipedia, which I would take to be more credible in this context, says it "was a hypothetical computer program" and explains the philosophical point put forth by the idea. So it was not a language, not even a real program, and certainly not actively used.
- tyingq 5y ago
  "open source" only appears in the editorialized HN title.
kortex 5y ago
I like how comprehensive this is. Some of these are super obscure, including some systems that seem to only be referenced in a scholastic paper. I don't like how disorganized/mis-characterized this is. As others have pointed out, there is little mention of open source (have to go into the language page for that), and these aren't all programming languages. Seems like it started as such and then scope crept to include...formal languages? What is CSV even? Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome that there is some abstraction in which Arezzo notation, matplotlib, CSV, and a bunch of esolangs are in the same category. But saying it could benefit from focus is an understatement. The website, for being as sparse and web 1.0 as it is, takes a long time to first interactive scroll on mobile. I think both problems could be solved, or mitigated, by breaking it into separate lists. Programming languages, libraries, markup languages, encoding formats, and "misc".
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Can you really call a list comprehensive if it contains a ton of incorrect entries? Just because someone talks a lot doesn't mean they know a lot, just like a long list isn't necessarily comprehensive just because it's long
  - kortex 5y ago
    Comprehensive is not the same thing as accuracy. I am just remarking that it has a lot of entries that you would not necessarily see elsewhere.
kureikain 5y ago
Want to plug in my favourite https://github.com/kanaka/mal https://github.com/kanaka/mal basically make a lisp in lot of language. Really give you ther idea of what is needed in build a programming language. Soemthing won't quite obvious. until you I down and write code. Example the ability to rewind, go back to a few earlier token.
NylaTheWolf 5y ago
Excuse me for being an idiot, but are programming languages not...always open source? How else are you supposed to learn and use them?
- tyingq 5y ago
  It's usually the source code for the compiler or interpreter we're referring to when we say a language is open source or not. As you say, though, it is a misnomer of sorts. Many languages have both open and closed source compilers.
ncmncm 5y ago
Law: Only an idiot thinks anybody else will use their new language. Corollary: All languages are created by idiots. We have been very lucky that a few languages created by such idiots have turned out to be usable. I doubt the ones that happened not to fizzle would have been the best a priori choices, but by the Law we are lucky that any are usable at all.
jokoon 5y ago
It's nice, but there are no tags for compiled/interpreted/influences.
rurban 5y ago
It doesn't seperate language implementations from languages. And it misses 2 of 3 of mine. Which are not eso nor toy languages.
codelani 5y ago
Wow, alerted by a few pull requests and then pleasantly surprised to see this here. As tyingq pointed out, this is not a list of "open source" languages, though I don't think it was too off for the OP to add that since indeed most of them are. It's also a bit broader than "programming languages". The list is termed "computer languages". That is the main category and ~75% of the langs, but formats and other things are counted as well (see table below). Even musical notations make an appearance, as I find those relevant to people interested in designing computer languages for music, or visual languages in general. While the focus is on computer languages, I think it's helpful to have a light touch of some of the earlier developments in language in general. So I didn't draw explicit lines, rather the strategy is to keep focus on programming languages with a peripheral view of the bigger picture. type count pl 3096 application 111 queryLanguage 82 textMarkup 67 grammarLanguage 65 xmlFormat 61 editor 57 packageManager 56 binaryDataFormat 51 metaLanguage 50 template 49 library 40 textData 39 protocol 37 esolang 37 notation 36 assembly 34 ir 20 compiler 20 isa 18 standard 18 idl 17 schema 14 visual 14 computingMachine 13 plzoo 12 filesystem 11 framework 11 jsonFormat 11 hashFunction 10 os 10 ... As to accuracy, in general, there are ~420,000 cells in my "spreadsheet". My initial target accuracy was ~98% or so. Gathering the cells was a mixture of manual curation, crawlers, simple NLP models, and contributions from the community. This project sadly fell by the wayside. I need to decide whether to 1) abandon it and instead just contribute facts as I find them to the relevant pages on Wikipedia or 2) determine if there's a good reason to build a fact site like this outside Wikipedia and if so get it into gear. Sorry about any inaccuracies and thank you for the feedback (and especially the pull requests!).

79 points by mahmoudimus 5y ago

The title is misleading. I don't see "open source" mentioned anywhere on this page. e.g. it is very unlikely that all the Basic variants listed here are open source.

rsstack 5y ago
There are languages you could write open-source applications with /s There are definitely proprietary languages on that list.
tyingq 5y ago
To be clear, the HN title is misleading. The page itself isn't claiming to list "open source" anything.

znpy 5y ago

The title is misleading. The list is about languages, of any kind, no matter if open source or not, or even if related to computing or not. So much so that some entries that initially appeared weird to me are: - morse code - arezzo notation (a musical notation system) - Balanced ternary Then you look better... and you realize it's about languages in general, not about open source or programming at all.

klyrs 5y ago
Weirdly, the list itself is shared source (visible, encouragement to fork & PR, no license to be seen)
JasonFruit 5y ago
Not even just languages. atom-editor is not a language.
netizen-936824 5y ago
Some of them aren't even languages. Like another commenter mentioned, it's just a list of things. Which makes me wonder: why is it on HN

unfocused 5y ago

This list is very random. You can’t lump in musical notation from the year “1033” and call it programming. They need to pick a theme at least, to make this useful.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I could almost stretch my mind that far. You could kind of think of a song as a program, and the musical notation as the programming language, and the performance of the song as executing the program. Almost. It's sure not Turing complete, though...

ModernMech 5y ago

Super cool! This list is very comprehensive and includes languages that aren’t on many other lists. I’m wondering how the author collected all of these. I’ve been building a list of programming languages posted to HN in my favorites list — it’s fun because everyone has their own idea or angle on what a programming language should look like and what features it should have.

__s 5y ago
It's a bit off, plenty of not-a-programming-language entries, & it isn't comprehensive Anyways, if you want lots of silly languages https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list https://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list I'll list some languages I've implemented which aren't on this list: https://github.com/serprex/Rue https://github.com/serprex/Rue I implemented Rue based off of https://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue https://esolangs.org/wiki/Thue but with the idea to extend it with regex & modules https://github.com/serprex/oilrs https://github.com/serprex/oilrs https://esolangs.org/wiki/OIL https://esolangs.org/wiki/OIL someone shared an esolang they'd been implementing in Python, I decided to implement it in Rust. Making a second implementation made for good discussion, such as "how strict is integer format?" where it was decided 007 shouldn't be accepted, that empty cell vs empty-string cell being semantically different be kept, & the stdlib was moved to its own repo https://github.com/serprex/NULL https://github.com/serprex/NULL I decided to port https://esolangs.org/wiki/NULL https://esolangs.org/wiki/NULL to Rust. If there were more programs in NULL I'd consider digging for a faster bignum implementation Bonus: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Three_Star_Programmer https://esolangs.org/wiki/Three_Star_Programmer is an interesting one-instruction machine. One instruction is a neat space, a somewhat different dimension of minimalism from brainfuck, see also https://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot https://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot

dragonwriter 5y ago

They aren't consistently open source or programming languages (only categories “pl” and “esolang” seem to be programming languages.) It's a list of...things.

mypalmike 5y ago
Even among "pl", even a quick sampling shows that these aren't necessarily correctly categorized. For instance, "advice-taker" according to the site is "an actively used programming language created in 1958". But Wikipedia, which I would take to be more credible in this context, says it "was a hypothetical computer program" and explains the philosophical point put forth by the idea. So it was not a language, not even a real program, and certainly not actively used.
tyingq 5y ago
"open source" only appears in the editorialized HN title.

kortex 5y ago

I like how comprehensive this is. Some of these are super obscure, including some systems that seem to only be referenced in a scholastic paper. I don't like how disorganized/mis-characterized this is. As others have pointed out, there is little mention of open source (have to go into the language page for that), and these aren't all programming languages. Seems like it started as such and then scope crept to include...formal languages? What is CSV even? Don't get me wrong, I think it's awesome that there is some abstraction in which Arezzo notation, matplotlib, CSV, and a bunch of esolangs are in the same category. But saying it could benefit from focus is an understatement. The website, for being as sparse and web 1.0 as it is, takes a long time to first interactive scroll on mobile. I think both problems could be solved, or mitigated, by breaking it into separate lists. Programming languages, libraries, markup languages, encoding formats, and "misc".

netizen-936824 5y ago
Can you really call a list comprehensive if it contains a ton of incorrect entries? Just because someone talks a lot doesn't mean they know a lot, just like a long list isn't necessarily comprehensive just because it's long
- kortex 5y ago
  Comprehensive is not the same thing as accuracy. I am just remarking that it has a lot of entries that you would not necessarily see elsewhere.

kureikain 5y ago

Want to plug in my favourite https://github.com/kanaka/mal https://github.com/kanaka/mal basically make a lisp in lot of language. Really give you ther idea of what is needed in build a programming language. Soemthing won't quite obvious. until you I down and write code. Example the ability to rewind, go back to a few earlier token.

NylaTheWolf 5y ago

Excuse me for being an idiot, but are programming languages not...always open source? How else are you supposed to learn and use them?

tyingq 5y ago
It's usually the source code for the compiler or interpreter we're referring to when we say a language is open source or not. As you say, though, it is a misnomer of sorts. Many languages have both open and closed source compilers.

ncmncm 5y ago

Law: Only an idiot thinks anybody else will use their new language. Corollary: All languages are created by idiots. We have been very lucky that a few languages created by such idiots have turned out to be usable. I doubt the ones that happened not to fizzle would have been the best a priori choices, but by the Law we are lucky that any are usable at all.

jokoon 5y ago

It's nice, but there are no tags for compiled/interpreted/influences.

rurban 5y ago

It doesn't seperate language implementations from languages. And it misses 2 of 3 of mine. Which are not eso nor toy languages.

codelani 5y ago

Wow, alerted by a few pull requests and then pleasantly surprised to see this here. As tyingq pointed out, this is not a list of "open source" languages, though I don't think it was too off for the OP to add that since indeed most of them are. It's also a bit broader than "programming languages". The list is termed "computer languages". That is the main category and ~75% of the langs, but formats and other things are counted as well (see table below). Even musical notations make an appearance, as I find those relevant to people interested in designing computer languages for music, or visual languages in general. While the focus is on computer languages, I think it's helpful to have a light touch of some of the earlier developments in language in general. So I didn't draw explicit lines, rather the strategy is to keep focus on programming languages with a peripheral view of the bigger picture. type count pl 3096 application 111 queryLanguage 82 textMarkup 67 grammarLanguage 65 xmlFormat 61 editor 57 packageManager 56 binaryDataFormat 51 metaLanguage 50 template 49 library 40 textData 39 protocol 37 esolang 37 notation 36 assembly 34 ir 20 compiler 20 isa 18 standard 18 idl 17 schema 14 visual 14 computingMachine 13 plzoo 12 filesystem 11 framework 11 jsonFormat 11 hashFunction 10 os 10 ... As to accuracy, in general, there are ~420,000 cells in my "spreadsheet". My initial target accuracy was ~98% or so. Gathering the cells was a mixture of manual curation, crawlers, simple NLP models, and contributions from the community. This project sadly fell by the wayside. I need to decide whether to 1) abandon it and instead just contribute facts as I find them to the relevant pages on Wikipedia or 2) determine if there's a good reason to build a fact site like this outside Wikipedia and if so get it into gear. Sorry about any inaccuracies and thank you for the feedback (and especially the pull requests!).