It would be nice if time were represented graphically. (Imagine this animated Hans Rosling style.)
The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.
Funny to see Eiffel with such a large circle even though it had very limited adoption. I had a soft spot for it once and failed miserably at getting it adopted in my company. Its contracts and invariants were very appealing and probably why it has such a large influence in this graph.
Beyond its contracts and invariants, Meyer made Eiffel a very "opinionated" language, with those opinions argued forcefully in his Object-Oriented Software Construction. It seems to me that well-argued, almost "ideological" designs tend to have outsized influence. The original relational database papers by Codd come similarly to mind.
It isn't just having a good mathematical model or strong abstract theory. Eiffel got co/contravariance wrong (or at least, incomplete), after all.
15 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] thread(so people realize you're joking)
The graphic shows a kind of downward flow from ALGOL (which is fair enough) but you can almost see modern programming languages as lying in an overlapping confluence of ideas from ALGOL and Lisp (and Simula, itself derived from ALGOL a close third), but Lisp is at the bottom-left.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...
It isn't just having a good mathematical model or strong abstract theory. Eiffel got co/contravariance wrong (or at least, incomplete), after all.