SaaS Blogs

Matt Ammerman recently forwarded me this diagram, which describes the evolution of programming languages in a timeline fashion. Although in the back of my mind I was aware of how many languages exist(ed), to see it laid out is remarkable. Computer Science as a field has gone through massive change, with programming languages defining a “fossil record” of sorts.

Looking at the diagram, the most interesting thing is the seemingly strong correlation on how popular (where popularity should be taken literally, meaning number of people or percentage of industry using it)a language is/was and whether it existed in its own evolutionary tract or was a convergence of multiple, older languages and paradigms. Obviously, there are some exceptions to this correlation, such as a COBOL and Fortran, but looking at which languages are popular in the modern day, it seems quite apparant that those languages which merged various constructs from multiple languages tend to be more popular (such as Java, Ruby, and C#). Assuming convergence continues to happen, will we reach the level of one super-language, abstract enough to cover all needs yet powerful enough to be useful? From this diagram, things seem to trend towards yes.  The beginning of the timeline introduces a small number of distant languages. The middle seems like a Manhattan traffic accident, with splinters fragments of languages as well as the introduction of new language tracks, making for a heavily saturated section of time. As time progresses to current day, we see some heavy convergence and “thinning out.” Although I doubt this will lead to one “super language”, it does seem reasonable to think that we’re going to continue refining the best languages, and weeding out those that are considered unproductive quite quickly.