Wikipedia: Programming language timeline/Talk

Copied from Programming language/Timeline which is now redirected. -- Buz Cory.

Changed language links to be uniformly "X programming language" which is supposed the standard name for a programming language page. See disambiguating?

Some links now need fixing. For instance, the page C language needs renaming to C programming language.

Fix the destinations, not the pointers to them. -- Buz Cory

Some things are here that don't belong here. Notably Compilers (MicroSoft C), GUIs (Microsoft Windows) and OSen (CP/M, Linux).

Where a particular compiler extends the language (Such as the Borland Pascal compilers did), it should be here. Where it is a pretty standard implementation, it does not.

I will be removing things that seem inappropriate. -- Buz Cory

Am making a second section for items where the date is unknown or questionable. -- Buz Cory

I see you moved the legend back to the bottom of the page, and that's fine, but I think the link back to the programming language page should have been kept. --loh


: As a matter of fact, I was forced to reformat some (select/paste from NS6 to my editor lost the leading spaces) and so put a new legend at the top. You're right about the programming language link, it is now at the top. I only left the old legend at the bottom because I thought someone might want to make something of it. --Buz Cory

I agree that there is far too many versions of the same things. If we are going to include all languages on this time line it will be unusable. Really it should just show the major movements in the programming world.


: Actually, if only languages are mentioned, there are several hundred, probably (including all variations). Not an unworkable number. There is a separate hardware timeline page, and separate timelines for OSen, and another for Commercial End User Apps might be a good idea.

: Just don't mix them all on one page! --Buz Cory

I think you are out by an order of magnitude for the number of languages. Now I don't dispute each of these languages deserve a page on the wikipedia, but by having a time line consisting of x000 languages is not really going to convery much useful info.

What I may get around to is for the Lisp family, just show LISP, Common-Lisp, and Scheme in the main time-line but ALSO have a LISP-time-line. Other candidates would be FORTRAN-like, C-like, dBase-like, Pascal-like languages etc.

Any views on this approach?


: If you are right on numbers, your approach is probably better. For the moment, I think this page, as it is, is probably best. If/when it gets too big, we can always split it. --Buz Cory

I noticed that some entries here are at variance with the corresponding ones at History of computing. I have no way of deciding these, but I think they should be mentioned and eventually, we should try to resolve these. --AxelBoldt

  Language       Programming Timeline         Computing History
  =============================================================
  FORTRAN          59                           54-57
  LISP             59                           58-60
  Algol            58                           60
  APL              62                           61
  COBOL            60                           59-61
  Turbo Pascal     83                           84
  Ada              83                           79

Lisp: as explained in LISP programming language, McCarthy? claims to have invented it in 1958, he makes this claim in his 1960 paper. It is doubtful that any implementation actually existed at the time (but that is true of many languages). --drj

What date do we use in the Programming language timeline: the date of first implementation or of first description? --AxelBoldt

Well, I would say first implementation or first description. There are plenty of languages in which the implementation came first (perl, python, C) and plenty of languages in which the description came first (Lisp, Algol?, CPL, intercal). Reading the papers that the creators of these languages wrote one gets the impression that if the implementation came first then that was when the language was created and if the description came first then that was when the language was created. Which all seems pretty sensible to me.

Languages that evolve from others, for example B to NB to C, are more problematic because there was probably a continuous series of compilers that grew away from language and towards another. Even once the bootstrapping stage is reached.

Intercal? is an interesting case as well because the language existed for 8 years before anyone wrote an implementation of it. Similarly it is not clear to me whether CPL ever had an implementation. In what sense are these computer programming languages? The facts seem to indicate that computer programming languages are more uses than the mere programming of computers, they can be used to express ideas between programmers or mathematicians for example (indeed, [programs are speech]?!), so it isn't even necessary to have an implementation to be called a computer programming language. That was a bit more than I intended to say really. --drj

RPG is missing in the timeline!