Show HN: Programming Languages Timeline | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Programming Languages Timeline

vullum.io

21 pointseiriklv24 comments

Interesting data, but not the most readable.

Could you try:

- increasing contrast of text (vs background), - making it horizontal (time is already there, no need to make the whole plot diagonal) - making different author of language different color or font size than language (and perhaps, bottom to language name).

I believe it would add to readability.

I'll give it a shot! Thanks for the feedback :-)

Would be nice if it the scroll directions were associated so you don't have to manually scroll both ways to keep the text in view.

I agree on this, and will look into it :-)

Btw - the data is from wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag... if this is incomplete, then feel free to add the missing ones to the list give me a pull-request for this file - https://github.com/eiriklv/eiriklv.github.io/blob/master/tim...

This is a nice timeline, but unfortunately the text is quite difficult to read due to poor color contrast. Any chance this can be improved?

Will try to fix this. Thanks for the feedback! :-)

This is one of those sites I wouldn't mind the site hijacking my scroll. It would also be nice if you could show many any languages were created for a year in the year bar above, maybe on hover or as a badge.

That's interesting, seems that the only year without a new (known/significant) programming language from 1946 to now is 2013. I wonder why.

It seems like the past year or two have been rediscovery of languages from the not too distant past, and investment into those that are here...

Go, rust, closure, lua, node(js) and a few others have seen some massive interest the past two years, so it isn't that surprising.

Heavily inspired by https://github.com/cheeaun/life :-)

Thanks for making this! I had to pull myself away after 10min of reading this because it's quite addicting. One thing though: the style makes it really hard for me to read the text, I ended up just changing the text color for myself in Chrome. Still, bookmarked and will return :)

This is the most popular criticism it seems, so I'm fixing it right now :-) Thanks for feedback!

Sooooo much better! Thank you!

Great! Did some additional fixes now as well (smaller space between each year, bigger font size, etc). You might need to bust the varnish cache (?12345) to see it straight away. I'm trying to find a better color scheme as well - but I'm a really bad designer :-P

leave the years timeline fixed at the top.

I was trying to do that actually, but encountered the inherent issue of css not being able to only fix an element for only one axis. But i guess there is a solution for it, and i completely agree that it would be better :-)

Nice timeline, I would rethink the colors however. Maybe change the text to white?

Working on it. Thanks for feedback :-)

1972 was a crazy year.

Only other year that I think could rival it is 1995. Holy cow.

I would say 1995 is my favourite :-)

Definitely! Ruby, JavaScript, and Java are 3 of my main languages.

In the timeline, I don't see viml (Vim script).

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