It's really interesting that Haskell, which is often portrayed as merely an academic play-thing, is so prominent. By bringing together so many language features that were otherwise relatively obscure it's acted as a kind of language laboratory — and in doing so it's made a really clear case for a lot of them.

It's a language designer's language--just like jazz is often musician's music :).

Haskell serves as both a vessel and a showcase for PL research. It also has very close ties to a bunch of communities, including many of the people behind Microsoft's languages (VB.NET, C# and F#).

Also, while Haskell does not have a broad presence in industry, it does have a reasonable amount of mindshare. A surprising number of people know and talk about Haskell, even if they've never used it. This also helps influence the design of other languages.

I know I like to talk about Haskell, even if it's too dense for me to grasp at a level where I could put it into production without jumping off a bridge.

It seems a bit odd that Javascript and Ecmascript landed in two very different parts of the graph.

...I just read that as EczemaScript.

if I remember correctly the Wikipedia article on EcmaScript included a bunch on ActionScript

This graph needs a clean up and there should be arrows.

Basic and QBasic/QuickBasic are on two different parts of the graph, as well as Javascript and Ecmascript.

The should be interactive and force-based so that it aligns in a nicer way.

Looks like some careful editing of Wikipedia pages would clean this up immensely, the various isolates strands of BASIC stood out to me.

Not to mention that it's just repeating whatever myths Wikipedia has picked up, like the connection of Javascript to Scheme. A more rigorously curated graph would be very interesting.

So I've had this one under construction for a while:

It's handmade, so it's better but not perfect:

https://app.box.com/s/lo36pbyqi3v2fg1wqefx [Language Family Tree.svg]

https://app.box.com/s/qxq4ohxfv44j3euas5gl [Language Family Tree.graffle]

I thought that AppleScript looked oddly placed, sheltering directly under Lisp. But some people do consider it to be influenced by Lisp/Scheme - Matt Neuburg proposes the connection somewhere in his 'AppleScript - the definitive guide'. I would have connected it more with HyperTalk, which is down past ECMAscript. And English.

> AppleScript was officially conceived in 1989 as a research project by the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) at Apple Computer and was code-named “Family Farm.” The research team was led by Larry Tesler and included Mike Farr, Mitchell Gass, Mike Gough, Jed Harris, Al Hoffman, Ruben Kleiman, Edmund Lai, and Frank Ludolph.

Some of those knew Lisp. The Advanced Technology Group led by Tesler used Macintosh Common Lisp in many application prototypes and research projects. There was an 'AppleScript on Steroids' written in MCL called Sk8Script by them.

The image itself: http://bgriffen.scripts.mit.edu/www/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

Why is Sing# out there by itself? It's a direct descendent of C#.

Looks like it's because the connection between C# and Sing# isn't noted in the "Influenced By" field in the infobox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_Sharp

See also http://oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html

http://www.levenez.com/lang/ looks much much more exhaustive.

CoffeeScript is in an interesting place.

right next to the oddly placed c++11

Which was in no way influenced by c++

would be more interesting if it were interactive. Right not it's barely readable.

A while ago I created an interactive version of programming languages influence, see it at http://exploringdata.github.io/vis/programming-languages-inf...

It is based on Freebase data, which differs from DBpedia, although it is one of Freebase's sources.

That was my first thought as well. I wish I could click on a single language and have it highlight only its direct connections or darken everything else.

Graph in the middle of that page is zoomable

Erlang is missing.

Maybe it doesn't have any influence(s).

Nope. It is heavily influenced by Prolog.

And it influenced Scala, Go and many more.