

Mapping How Programming Languages Influenced Each Other According to Wikipedia - gtani
http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/07/03/mapping-how-programming-languages-influenced-each-other-according-to-wikipedia/

======
edoloughlin
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
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.

------
dkhenry
That is a very poorly laid out map. This one is much better indexed by time

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues.jpg)

~~~
Ralith
That's not a very good map either--there's no connection between ML and
Haskell, for starters.

~~~
quarterto
Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I
need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.

~~~
michaelcampbell
It is. It's just the wrong one.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_\(hardware_description_language\))

------
podperson
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.

------
K2h
Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?

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

~~~
jonsen
Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.

------
a3_nm
Arranged by hand, but much better: <http://www.levenez.com/lang/>

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

------
kmdent
Zoom would be helpful.

