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The History of Programming Languages

Posted by michael on from the in-the-beginning-was-the-command-line dept.

Dozix007 writes "For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages and O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline."

7 of 684 comments (clear)

  1. Link is a 39x17 PDF by The+Angry+Mick · · Score: 5, Informative

    You may want to "right-click, Save As" that puppy . . .

    --

    I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.

  2. Re:Great! by Jaywalk · · Score: 5, Informative
    Now I need to go buy a 40" monitor to view the whole thing at once...
    Or you could buy two of their books from oreilly.com and get the poster for free by using discount code OPC79 in the shopping cart.

    Unless you need an excuse to buy a 40" monitor, in which case, just forget I said anything.

    --
    ===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
  3. Related by arvindn · · Score: 4, Informative
    A hundred year language

    Beating the averages

    Both are amazingly good.

  4. Re:SmallTalk by One+Louder · · Score: 5, Informative
    The original Smalltalk-80 has a direct descendent in Squeak. The original Smalltalk guys, including Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls, still work on it.

    It's quite impressive how it has evolved, and is still one of the most entertaining software environments around.

  5. Re:Great! by stanmann · · Score: 5, Informative
    And of course in a very small way they are correct, since that is an abridged version of the statement
    develop the first commercial programming language for a personal microcomputer.
    Which is a true statement.
    --
    Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
  6. Re:A program written in many of them by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's a polyglot of only seven languages (COBOL, Pascal, Fortran, C, PostScript, sh, and 8086 assembly), but perhaps you were thinking of this?

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  7. Perl is just as wrong by ajs · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perl's history starts with nawk and sh at version 1.0 and there are no further influences listed. At least that's what's in the picture.

    A more accurate history would be:

    Perl 1.0: awk, sh, C, BASIC
    Perl 5.0: C++, LISP

    Listed as a seperate line:

    Perl6 A1-12: Perl 5.0, LISP, C#, C++, Ruby, Java, Python, SNOBOL

    To be more specific, Perl 1.0 had heavy influences from C. The most obvious influecnes were in the operator precedence, ternary operator and behavior of parens.

    In 5.0, the influence of C++ was felt strongly on the establishment of Perl 5's non-object-model object model (AKA the object model construction kit) and from LISP can the idea of closures.

    Come Perl6, of course, it's a different language which borrows most of all from Perl 5, but also heavily from the other languages listed. Adding LISP currying, Ruby mix-ins, a Java and/or C#-like VM, python-like exceptions and a number of features from C++ including templated proto-classes and iterators as well as dozens of unique features. But, ultimately I think the most world-view altering change will be the SNOBOL-like inline grammar construction.