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Adventures in Computer Programming

Evolution of Programming Languages

This diagram shows the family tree of all the “Major Programming Languages” and all those that influenced or were influenced by them. Both the selection of what constitutes a “major” programming language and which languages influenced which were determined by Wikipedia and are limited in their accuracy by the articles there on the various languages.

The Evolution of Programming Languages
Full Diagram
DIA source (diagramming software)

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10 Responses

  1. Name says:

    I’m not seeing Forth, although it is listed as a major language by Wikipedia. Of course, sometimes I don’t see things that are there.

  2. Mike Gray says:

    From my perspective Java was heavily influenced by Smalltalk, but your diagram does not make that evident.

  3. I used the data from Wikipedia. If there was no mention in the article, the line was not drawn. Otherwise I could have agonised over it for months (and wouldn’t have even heard of some of these).

    So if you don’t like the conclusions you /could/ edit Wikipedia! Don’t forget your citations though!

  4. Ken McKee says:

    Smalltalk was also influence by Lisp.
    http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

    http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html
    “the greatest single programming language ever designed”
    - Alan Kay, on Lisp

  5. Yaa101 says:

    Somebody has beat you doing this:

    http://www.levenez.com/lang/

    Ok, it’s a line diagram, but still…

  6. Dave says:

    Javascript inherits heavily from Perl, including its use of regexp, list, and object literals and short-circuit logical operators.

  7. Between BASIC and “Visual Basic” either Quick Basic or PDS should be in there, and FreeBASIC also inherits from Quick Basic.

    http://www.freebasic.net/

  8. Anonymous says:

    Java was actually inflenced by Objective-C

  9. Yes, as this post makes abundantly clear: http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/seanl/stuff/java-objc.html

    So Wikipedia is now somewhat more accurate than it was in March. I shan’t claim all the credit ;)

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