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Interactive Timeline
History of Programming Languages
Seven decades of programming languages, from Fortran and Lisp in the late 1950s through the ALGOL line, the C family, the Lisp and ML traditions, and today's Rust, Go, Kotlin, and TypeScript. Hover any language to trace what shaped it and what it went on to shape.
How to read this: each pill is a language placed at its birth year in one of six paradigm lanes. The curved links show direct influence. Hover a language to light up its ancestry (warm) and descendants (cool). Click to pin it and open the detail card. Switch views with the tabs to recolor by paradigm, typing discipline, or era.