O’Reilly published a chart laying out the history and relationships of various programming languages:
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! O’Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages (PDF: 701K), which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline.
Interesting. What can one draw from this? A couple of things come to mind:
- Life was pretty simple in the early 60’s with only a hand full of programming languages. Makes one wonder whether the complexity introduced by having multiple (and usually incompatible) languages is worth it.
- Lots of change. In this instance the change is incremental–it adds new things without immediate affect on current routine–and thus can quite often be easily ignored. At some point however, such incremental changes do impact and then, well, it’s too late.
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