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Mapping How Programming Languages Influenced Each Other According to Wikipedia

42 points by gtani 14y ago

adventureloop 14y ago
I tried, but I cant find C anywhere inside there.
- jonsen 14y ago
  Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.
- delluminatus 14y ago
  ha, ha. (so people realize you're joking)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
K2h 14y ago
Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?
kmdent 14y ago
Zoom would be helpful.
podperson 14y ago
It would be nice if time were represented graphically. (Imagine this animated Hans Rosling style.) The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.
dkhenry 14y ago
That is a very poorly laid out map. This one is much better indexed by time http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues.jpg http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....
- Ralith 14y ago
  That's not a very good map either--there's no connection between ML and Haskell, for starters.
  - quarterto 14y ago
    Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.
    - michaelcampbell 14y ago
      It is. It's just the wrong one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...
edoloughlin 14y ago
Funny to see Eiffel with such a large circle even though it had very limited adoption. I had a soft spot for it once and failed miserably at getting it adopted in my company. Its contracts and invariants were very appealing and probably why it has such a large influence in this graph.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  Beyond its contracts and invariants, Meyer made Eiffel a very "opinionated" language, with those opinions argued forcefully in his Object-Oriented Software Construction. It seems to me that well-argued, almost "ideological" designs tend to have outsized influence. The original relational database papers by Codd come similarly to mind. It isn't just having a good mathematical model or strong abstract theory. Eiffel got co/contravariance wrong (or at least, incomplete), after all.
a3_nm 14y ago
Arranged by hand, but much better: http://www.levenez.com/lang/ http://www.levenez.com/lang/
michaelcampbell 14y ago
The diagram is a... png?! This seems a much better application for SVG, I should think.

42 points by gtani 14y ago

adventureloop 14y ago

I tried, but I cant find C anywhere inside there.

jonsen 14y ago
Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.
delluminatus 14y ago
ha, ha. (so people realize you're joking)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

K2h 14y ago

Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?

kmdent 14y ago

Zoom would be helpful.

podperson 14y ago

It would be nice if time were represented graphically. (Imagine this animated Hans Rosling style.) The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.

dkhenry 14y ago

That is a very poorly laid out map. This one is much better indexed by time http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues.jpg http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....

Ralith 14y ago
That's not a very good map either--there's no connection between ML and Haskell, for starters.
- quarterto 14y ago
  Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.
  - michaelcampbell 14y ago
    It is. It's just the wrong one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...

edoloughlin 14y ago

Funny to see Eiffel with such a large circle even though it had very limited adoption. I had a soft spot for it once and failed miserably at getting it adopted in my company. Its contracts and invariants were very appealing and probably why it has such a large influence in this graph.

twoodfin 14y ago
Beyond its contracts and invariants, Meyer made Eiffel a very "opinionated" language, with those opinions argued forcefully in his Object-Oriented Software Construction. It seems to me that well-argued, almost "ideological" designs tend to have outsized influence. The original relational database papers by Codd come similarly to mind. It isn't just having a good mathematical model or strong abstract theory. Eiffel got co/contravariance wrong (or at least, incomplete), after all.

a3_nm 14y ago

Arranged by hand, but much better: http://www.levenez.com/lang/ http://www.levenez.com/lang/

michaelcampbell 14y ago

The diagram is a... png?! This seems a much better application for SVG, I should think.