All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Family Tree of Programming Languages

gnat on 2003-05-20T02:27:33

This poster of languages seems a little fictitious when it comes to our own favourite. No Perl 5? Ruby isn't descended from Perl? Perl's not descended from C?

--Nat

A different Ruby?

jhi on 2003-05-20T06:29:25

"A hardware description language"?
But yes, the chart seems to be somewhat, err, tilted.

What about Turtle Graphics?

schwern on 2003-05-20T08:48:57

They missed the sed -> Perl, Smalltalk -> [Ruby, Perl] (not sure if that's direct though), CLU -> Ruby and am I right in not seeing Logo or Turtle Graphics *anywhere*?

I like that Perl 1.00 is considered to be "Active, Thousands of Users".

Re:What about Turtle Graphics? and lots more!!!

n1vux on 2003-05-20T18:58:23

I.Other Languages.

Turtle Graphics is there, the Logo line branches off LISP quite early.

Majority of Lisp and Fortran dialects ignored; Watfor, Watfiv. Scheme fed back into CL. Isn't ML related to Lisp and Haskell? Prolog was spawned by Lisp.

Addendum on PL/1: it included features of Lisp with Cobol and Fortran, with the syntax of Algol.

Ruby folks seem to say Ruby is Perl with SmallTalks real-OO, with Python and Lisp mixed in to.

Python specifically names Perl as Anti-influence and claims Lisp heritage.

Perl5->Ruby->Perl6

II. The One True Language

C++ -> Java -> J++, C# (and slightly JavaScript)

The classical list of Perl meme-donors appears to be

  1. Tier 1: C, shell, AWK, sed (Larry, Taming of the camel; and secondary refs)
  2. Tier 2: C++ (mostly in Perl5?), BASIC-PLUS, FORTRAN, Prolog, LISP (Scheme), Ada (mostly in Perl5?), grep, COBOL (think formats), PL/I, SNOBOL, and Python. (mostly Larry, 1993, "Perl, the first postmodern computer language")
  3. Tier 3: (in Perl6 mostly) APL/J, Objective-C, ML, Java, Ruby, ...

- Bill

Re:What about Turtle Graphics? and lots more!!!

schwern on 2003-05-20T23:34:23

Point of order. Ruby existed before Perl 5, though it was late 1995 before Matz publicly released it. He also claims Python influences.

I knew Python then. But I didn't like it, because I didn't think it was a true object-oriented language. OO features are appeared to be add-on to the language.
--Matz

I'd make it more like (Python 1, Perl4, Smalltalk) -> Ruby though I'm not even sure Matz knew much Smalltalk at the time.

To call the chart tilted...

rjray on 2003-05-21T05:00:16

...is to be most polite, indeed.

Besides the question of omissions and missing/questionable lines of heritage, there are also such "forward-looking" statements as referring to C#'s staying power. Indeed, referring to either C# or Java as "classic" seems a little presumptious.