Axisless

The family tree of programming languages

59 programming languages from Fortran (1957) to Zig (2015): when each began and which language it grew out of, with a circle for how many developers still write it on GitHub. JavaScript, Python and TypeScript dwarf everything; ALGOL, Simula and Self, the ancestors of half the tree, are hollow rings.

The family tree of programming languages59 languages from Fortran (1957) to Zig (2015): when each began, and which language it grew out of.The circles show which are still alive: how many developers wrote code in each on GitHub in early 2026. 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s BUSINESS & BEGINNERS ALGOL & PASCAL THE C FAMILY SCRIPTING & THE WEB LISP, ML & FUNCTIONAL DATA & SCIENCE COBOL 1959 BASIC 1964 Visual Basic 1991 VB.NET 2001 Logo 1967 Scratch 2003 Fortran 1957 ALGOL 60 1960 Simula 1962 ALGOL 68 1968 Pascal 1970 Smalltalk 1972 Modula-2 1978 Ada 1980 Self 1987 Oberon 1987 BCPL 1967 B 1969 C 1972 C++ 1983 Objective-C 1984 Java 1995 C# 2001 Groovy 2003 Scala 2004 Rust 2006 Go 2009 Kotlin 2011 Dart 2011 Swift 2014 Zig 2015 AWK 1977 Perl 1987 Python 1991 Lua 1993 PHP 1995 Ruby 1995 JavaScript 1995 TypeScript 2012 Crystal 2014 Lisp 1958 Prolog 1972 ML 1973 Scheme 1975 Common Lisp 1984 Miranda 1985 Erlang 1986 Haskell 1990 OCaml 1996 F# 2005 Clojure 2007 Elixir 2011 Elm 2012 APL 1966 SQL 1974 S 1976 MATLAB 1984 R 1993 Julia 2009 DEVELOPERS PUSHING IT ON GITHUB, EARLY 2026 10k 500k 5m hardly anyData: Wikidata (CC0): each language’s inception year and what influenced it; one main parent is drawn for each; dashed lines are influence across families. GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0), 2026 Q1:developers pushing each language, summed over every country. Lisp and SQL are counted under their dialects; a dotted ring (COBOL, Scratch) is alive but mostly off GitHub.

Hover or tap a circle for its year and how many developers use it.

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Data: Wikidata (CC0), each language’s inception year and what influenced it, with one main parent drawn for each; GitHub Innovation Graph (CC0), developers pushing each language in 2026 Q1, summed over every country. The same GitHub data is a daily puzzle in World Imposter and Daily Shade: which countries code in PHP, Python and Ruby.

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