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.
Adventures in Computer Programming – bakert@gmail.com
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.
From my perspective Java was heavily influenced by Smalltalk, but your diagram does not make that evident.
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!
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
Somebody has beat you doing this:
http://www.levenez.com/lang/
Ok, it’s a line diagram, but still…
Javascript inherits heavily from Perl, including its use of regexp, list, and object literals and short-circuit logical operators.
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/
Java was actually inflenced by Objective-C
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 😉
Which Wikipedia article are you referring to as a source for this so-called list of “major” programming languages? You don’t link to it, and a search for “major programming languages” on WP doesn’t turn up an article of that title.
There is one for Programming Languages (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Programming_language) and it does mention Forth.
This article and the pages linked from it (particularly the Tiobe index and langpop.com) is probably a better starting point: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Measuring_programming_language_popularity
Another language that has achieved popularity since this posting, 5 years ago, is Erlang, which branches off from Prolog.
I’m really excited that someone linked to this diagram I drew more than five years ago, but I’m even less interested in getting into whether Forth is or is not a programming language than I was in March 2006. Feel free to make your own diagram and link it up in the comments.
what about lua?
Delphi is not (or was not) a programming language. It is an IDE for the Object Pascal programming language. The same language that (later versions of) Turbo Pascal used.
Looking at the comments, I suppose some parts of the diagram could be considered “controversial” (perhaps there will be a v2.0 with adjustments based on user feedback and sources other than Wikipedia?), but I still think it’s very cool, very nerdy/geeky (good), and reflects great effort. Do you have a vector version (instead of png)? This would be a great thing to blow up to poster size.
Couldn’t see Octave/MATLAB on there. Maybe more of a 5th generation language like R I suppose.