This is the book of the generations of the programming languages. In the day that Man created the Computer, in the likeness of Man made he it; with many languages created he it; and blessed it, and sometimes cursed it too, and called one of its languages "Algol", in the day when it was created.

And Algol lived a great number of years, and begat PL/I, Simula and Pascal; and Simula begat Smalltalk, C with Classes and Pascal;

And Smalltalk begat Objective-C, Java and Ruby; and Java begat NetRexx and C#...

The Programming Languages Genealogy Project is a genealogical hyperlinked map of the most important programming languages. You may start navigating through the genealogy by choosing one of the languages below. When there are several write-ups about a language, choose the one authored by thbz-gene.

Rose Thorn says that I "leave out the fact that language features come from many, many languages". I agree that the programming languages breed in a more complex way than human beings, and sometimes this project oversimplifies their relationships.

You will find below a listing of computer languages by date and another listing by name.

Computer languages listed by date

1954: Fortran
1957: Cobol
1958: Algol
1958: Lisp
around 1958: Comit
1960: APL
1960: Algol 60
1962: Snobol
1964: PL/I
1964: Simula
1964: Basic
1964: TRAC
around 1965: CPL
around 1966: Algol W
1967: BCPL
1968: Logo
1969: B
1969: Smalltalk
1970: Forth
1970: Prolog
1970: Pascal
1970: Algol 68
1970: Icon
1971: C
1971: sh
1972: PL/M
1974: Clu
1975: Modula
1975: Scheme
1978: awk
1978: csh
around 1978: InterPress
1978: JaM
1979: Rex
1979: Ada
1980: C with Classes
1981: ABC
1982: ksh
1983: Turbo Pascal
1983: Objective-C
1983: C++
1983: ML
1984: PostScript
1984: Neon
1984: Concurrent C
1984: Common Lisp
1985: Object Pascal
1986: Eiffel
1987: Oberon
1987: Perl
1987: Caml
1988: Tcl
1988: Modula 3
1989: Yerk
1989: Clos
1989: bash
1991: Python
1991: NetRexx
1991: Java
1991: Sather
around 1991: Visual Basic
around 1993: Mops
1993: Ruby
1995: Delphi
1995: PHP
1996: J
1996: Objective Caml
2000: C#
2000: Internet C++

Computer languages listed by name

ABC
Ada
Algol
Algol 60
Algol 68
Algol W
APL
awk
B
bash
Basic
BCPL
C
C with Classes
C#
C++
Caml
Clos
Clu
Cobol
Comit
Common Lisp
Concurrent C
CPL
csh
Delphi
Eiffel
Forth
Fortran
Icon
Internet C++
InterPress
J
JaM
Java
ksh
Lisp
Logo
ML
Modula
Modula 3
Mops
Neon
NetRexx
Oberon
Object Pascal
Objective Caml
Objective-C
Pascal
Perl
PHP
PL/I
PL/M
PostScript
Prolog
Python
Rex
Ruby
Sather
Scheme
sh
Simula
Smalltalk
Snobol
Tcl
TRAC
Turbo Pascal
Visual Basic
Yerk

Thanks to: czw, dabcanboulet, dvdeug, ponder, zemman, Peej, ssd, feoh, Blue_Bellied_Lizard, m_turner, Noung, g_braad, TallRoo, StrawberryFrog, 00100, motiz88 and many others.

Credits: most of the data were found in a remarkable diagram created by Éric Lévénez (http://www.levenez.com/lang/). I wrote a (slightly modified) XML version, and wrote an XSL style sheet to generate the write-ups, which I submitted manually.

The author of the write-ups is thbz-gene, a user account I created for this purpose. Please /msg any comment to thbz, not to thbz-gene.

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