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.

That is a very poorly laid out map. This one is much better indexed by time

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....

That's not a very good map either--there's no connection between ML and Haskell, for starters.

Or Self and JavaScript. And it calls Ruby a "hardware description language". I need to stop reading it, it's making me angry.

It is. It's just the wrong one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(hardware_description_lang...

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.

Can you render a large resolution so we can see the small dots with labels?

I tried, but I cant find C anywhere inside there.

Right between ALGOL 68 and C++.

ha, ha.

(so people realize you're joking)

Arranged by hand, but much better: http://www.levenez.com/lang/

The diagram is a... png?! This seems a much better application for SVG, I should think.

Zoom would be helpful.