I've been asked by the german branch of O'Reilly to update their poster featuring the family tree of programming languages. Since the last public release of said poster some time has passed, so a few things have changed in the world of coding.
When I received the template of the current state of the poster, I was a bit disappointed by seeing the timeline culminating in a bunch of thinning parallel lines of the past 5-10 years, after the exciting crissing and crossing of the wild
70s. So I decided to not just extend the tree with the well known established languages, and to not only add the well known up-and-comming languages, but to add some of the less well known and experimental languages as well. Otherwise one could get a distressing sense that the world of programming languages has grown stagnant and tentative, whereas I think we're on the cusp of a new explosion of exploratory languages.
Let me give you a run-down of the languages that popped up since 2000 that I've
collected so far, and would love to hear of any others I might have missed and you deem important. Please note though that both space on the poster and time available to me are finite
, so I will have to draw the line somewhere - unfortunately I won't be able to include a majority of the 8512 languages present in the Encyclopedia of Computer Languages (http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/) :)
New "major" players:
Clojure, D, Erlang, F#, Factor, Funnel, Go, Groovy, IO, Lua, Scala, Windows Power
shell
Experimental/young languages:
Agena, Alef++, BeanShell, BitC, Boo, Cat, Chapel, Clay, Cobra, Falcon, Fantom, Fortress, Frink, Ioke, Joy, Judoscript, Mirah, Nice, Noop, OOC, Pizza, Quark, Reia, Rust, Scratch, X10
PS: Does anyone have any information about the date of appearance and languages
that influenced the design of Fjölnir (Icelandic programming language) or DRAKON
, PROL2, Rapira or Glagol (Soviet/russian programming languages)? My Google-Fu fails me on these.
Also possibly worth indicating: Objective C, while quite old, has suddenly become a major player since the rise of the iPhone App Store.