Digital Babel

The June issue of Wired has a nifty timeline tracing the roots of computer languages [ caution: 500k file ] from 1954 through 2001. It is interesting to see what has lived and what has not and that Perl sorta stops at Perl4.000 :) A sidebar also mentions Larry as a charismatic leader which is something I don't think has had that much influence on Perl's continued usage and survival as a computational tongue since Larry isn't that active outside of a small developer circle.

One visual effect of the timeline is just how much congestion in the number of languages there is after 1990, a computational Tower of Babel. Diversity isn't a good thing everywhere and, since Microsoft gained much of it's monopoly through Microsoft Office as the standard application which eased file exchanges, I suspect a majority of these languages will die off in the next few years. Speak: A Short History of Language may also provide some insight into survival of the fittest languages. After reading the 5th Apocalypse I have a feeling that Perl6 will need all the help it can get to survive.