A visual timeline of programming languages | Hacker News Reader

A visual timeline of programming languages

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66 pointsbontoJR36 comments

A timeline just isn't going to capture this.

Look at Garofalo's Genealogy of Pop/Rock poster or Gomley's History of Film poster for examples of timelines that more accurately reflect family influences.

If you establish domains like education, medical, military, business, engineering, gaming, hobbyists, etc., you could show more information on a vertical axis, such as MUMPS being almost exclusively used by hospital systems, or Lua being born from C and finding a niche in game scripting.

And by the end, I had a creepy, squicky feeling. It just felt like a rip of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua.... Check the "RecurVoice" thing at the end. It looks like wiki-advertising.

Yup, I also noticed the "RecurVoice" ad at the end.

Someone's been playing with Wikidata/Wikipedia!

As others have noted, this is a little incomplete (no Lisp) and seems to have some odd entries - the last item seems to be a voice-controlled business software package, not a language.

In this timeline, Common Lisp first appears when it was standardized. It should probably also mention its predecessor MACLISP.

For much more on Lisp of all varieties (including Common Lisp), see http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ .

Thanks. Gives a nice overview of when things came about.

A few more that you might consider: CoffeeScript, TypeScript, BrightScript, Nim, Vala, XSL, awk, sed

Also, there is a nice list on Wikipedia for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_...

Not really. It has Scheme before Common Lisp which is fine but where is McCarthy's Lisp which was an ancestor of both of them? And Algol is not one language but several: Algol-60, Algol-68, Algol-W, ... And where is Turbo Pascal? There is so much mainstream stuff missing that it's hard to see any point in it; except perhaps an exercise in interactive grapics in which case the content is a kind of lorem ipsum.

how opinionated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%2...

I really like this! But I expected to see some code samples or something next to each description because of the title.

I especially like the image for Forth... Although a few code-samples would have ben nice here and there.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MjXNThXAz_A/T29VMoFcBKI/AAAAAAAAAP...

Why is that the picture for J?

Scheme is the first Lisp?

They definitely missed Lisp.

And lambda calculus. And whatever Babbage's machine was programmed in.

It wasn't programmed because it was never built (in his time anyway). I am assuming you are talking about the Analytical Engine, rather than the Difference Engine, since the latter is not a Turing machine.

The method of programming was to be via punched cards, whose contents was roughly analogous to machine code.

And ML. It is crazy to see what they didn't forget, and what they did.

Really neat.

My nitpick is that I wish the timeline data was a bit more granular — too many languages are put at the same mark due to being released in the same year. This is not a big problem when you go through the timeline sequentially as they still show up chronologically (I presume), but visually, it's less informative at a glance.

Interestingly if you search for a term the information view is changed but not the time bar. Then if you click on another language it will show the wrong one. It seems that the view just jumps relative to the last selected mark on the bar.

Lisp?!

It would be cool if the images reflected somehow the language as it was created. The Smalltalk showing a Windows XP window and BASIC without line numbers seem wrong.

Is it just me, or is Java not on the list?

Its there. 1995

Didnt find Java in there. Big miss.

It's there, 1995.

Didn't find it either. JavaScript is not Java...

edit: Well it seems that this is a browser issue. In chrome I find ColdFusion, in Firefox it's Java instead.

In Chrome I see Java but not Coldfusion. Weird. http://i.imgur.com/RjF1pOP.png

The bars are overlapping each other. You have to use the next button to see all of them.

I'm not seeing it either. For 1995, all I see are Ruby, Javascript, PHP, and ColdFusion.

Is beanshell actually a language ?

Uh, that's a timeline.

How could the author use the words 'visual history' in the title without at all attempting to display the lineage of languages?

I expected a picture of a tree, or web--not a line.

I just wanted some sense of the continuing extent of each language indicated, (that is, the labels should have variable widths). Admittedly it's difficult, and controversial, to conclude "when Pascal ceased to be important" but I'd still find it informative, even if only subjective.

Maybe a look at published new books and reprints on the subject of that language? It would certainly be a different texture than some kind of impossible study of how important a language is, but better than a straight timeline.

I was expecting a history of visual programming languages - which would be much smaller. :-)

That's something to celebrate!

http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...

Ok, we s/history/timeline/'d the title.

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