A Brief History of Programming Languages?

Aviancer asks: "French computer historian Éric Lévénez has compiled a family tree of programming languages that I found quite interesting. This prompted me to wonder if there was any controversy on the issue of language lineage and my searches found another page on the same topic. I thought I'd pull an 'ask the audience' to see if there were any corrections on either (both?) pages to be made." What other computing language origins are you aware of that may not be mentioned in either page?

Comments

What about Assembly language?

[Anonymous Coward]

The most significant programming language of them all is not even listed.

Re:No teaching/learning languages?

[prgrmr]

Also, BASIC was not used for anything strong, as in enterprise-class application developement.

Don't make guesses about what you don't know for a fact.

There are several million users world-wide running enterprise applications written in some varient of BASIC. One example is about 20% of the HMO's in the US are running an application owned by CA and written in either Pick Basic or UniVerse Basic (a product now owned by IBM).

Pick has it's own complex family tree

Re:Pascal

[pz]

BZZZZZZT. Wrong. C is an awful language for beginners, just as BASIC, FORTRAN, APL, ALGOL60, and so forth were, and Java, Pascal, and so forth continue to be because it is mired in syntax.

Software Engineering has absolutely nothing to do with syntax. Nothing. Would you ever consider that philosophy is the study of spelling? No, so why would you think that forcing a naive user to stumble hither and yon against arcane syntax is a good way of teaching programming concepts? You want to start --START-- with a language that has incredibly simple syntax. Like Lisp, Scheme, and the like. Then you can spend time worrying about things like data structures, lexical and dynamic scoping, control structures, etc. Once these fundamental notions are understood, then you can spend time with syntax.