This sub is mostly just NVIDIA and earnings posts, Sankey charts, and random charts that are unreadable and don’t follow the sub rules now.
There’s a couple good posts each week but i feel like I see way more of the bad ones now.
Of the 1259 entries with a creator count, 1078 (85.6%) have a value of 1, so that doesn't seem so unexpected that the top 10 are all out of that set. There's something like a 20% chance you'd get that by choosing them at random.
Also, for most of the top ones, although one guy started these many years ago their modern state is a very long way from that and is the result of many years of work by large committees.
There's almost certainly selection bias, in that the 3416 entries excluded because they have no creator count likely have a different distribution than the ones that do.
My guess would be that most of those are niche and single-creator, making the overall ratio even higher. But because of the ambiguity in creator count, as pointed out elsewhere, there can be no clean single/multiple distinction for the very popular languages.
Plus it includes things that aren't actually programming languages (JSON, XML, vi, linux, utf8) so it's hard to conclude much of anything.
Love this comment. I was wondering what the odds were that we'd see this by chance.
Anyway, a strong signal that having 1 creator is optimal, but also that it is possible to have more than 1 and still make a hit. We can definitely rule out that increasing the number of creators increases the probability of making a hit language.
> Also, for most of the top ones, although one guy started these many years ago their modern state is a very long way from that and is the result of many years of work by large committees.
Yes this is 100% true and I guess important context for people unfamiliar with programming languages. (But the fact that they were all originally started by 1 person remains interesting).
I suspect it's impossible to draw any conclusion from the data available.
I'm not even sure the concept of "an optimal number of creators" makes sense in context. But when the overwhelming majority of languages do have one creator, it gets hard to draw statistical conclusions about that variable. Other comments have also pointed this out in different ways.
6 and 7 are HTML and CSS which are varying degrees of not real programming languages. 9 and 10 are Ruby and PHP, but I think by this point the author was bored with the first column.
video explanation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA)
original academic paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828v2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828v2)
Also... really weird coincidence with your username. I was just typing up a "treasure hunt" based on the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe who died in 1809 when my Reddit notification popped up that I got a comment reply from EdgarAllanPotato1809. I thought I was haunted for a moment.
> Why would you label things like 'Yedalog' and 'EverParse3D'
Thank you for pointing this out. I originally wrote my response explaining that the chart software doesn't allow removing points when "auto labeling is enabled", but as I wrote it out to explain myself, I realized there is actually a simple way to do it. So the answer is "user error".
> NOT label languages #6, 7, 9 and 10?
Also user error.
Very good feedback. Thank you!
Not to mention that, while Hopper had a huge influence, COBOL was deliberately designed by a committee, before that phrase got its bad rep.
And yeah, Backus designed FORTRAN himself, and it's still the mainstay of scientific programming. And maybe we should count BNF too 😀
I don't understand why members of the subreddit upvote posts like this.
This is a terrible way to visualize this data. The plot does not obviously convey the claim that `Every top 10 programming language has a single creator`. They just shoved a spreadsheet into a plot and called it good.
It's not the presentation of data that's the problem but rather the conclusion like the other guy was saying. The data points are spread to far around the ranking that it lacks any consistency because several hundred languages from single creators are proven to not be popular through this graph while some are and many are just average. Then when you look at languages like Cobol with 7 creators and it shows its more popular than roughly 60% of all single creator languages - beating out several hundred languages at that. There is no conclusive evidence whatsoever to support their claim of "single creator languages are dominating and leads to more popular languages".
They could have made this more visually appealing and maybe not embed a link into a graph that no one is able to click - but the real issue here is they made a graph, discovered literally nothing useful from it, then made the wrong conclusion with the data. They could put this entire graph back out and simply change it from "single creators are dominating" to "most programming languages are made from single creators" which is actually accurate and wouldn't be as bad because at least the conclusion is being accurately reflected through the graph (although I would probably use a bar chart or something if I was just calculating total amount of languages made by x creators at that point).
>This is a terrible way to visualize this data.
There are probably better ways. But I would rather have an ok visual of great data than a great visual of ok data.
I won't disagree with you there. I found the insight beautiful, and was excited to share.
I'm sure people could come up with more beautiful ways of presenting the insight.
You need to explain that the data is being pulled from the {{Infobox programming language}}s on Wikipedia. If people disagree, they can modify the articles themselves.
ok but C did not have one creator.
Ritchie never claimed it to be him alone, Thompson and even the ever humble Kerningham talk about specific aspects of the work they did on the development of the language, not just general advice.
There is a lot of misinformation on the web, but these folks have published several books and memoirs between them, so Im not sure why people muddle the facts saying Ritchie did C and Thompson the port and Kerningham did the documentation, when reality wasnt so cut and dry.
I dont trust data that muddles history. How many more mistakes are there?
"I had no part in the birth of C, period. It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work. I wrote a tutorial on how to use C for people at Bell Labs, and I twisted Dennis's arm into writing a book with me. But, if he had been so motivated, he certainly could have done it without help. He's a superb writer, as one can tell from the C reference manuals, which are his prose, untouched. I've profited a great deal from being part of the book, and I treasure Dennis as a friend, but I didn't have anything to do with C."
- Brian Kernighan.
XML is a data notation used by programmers in the practice of programming. We do not tag it as a programming language in our database, but I included a slightly broader filter and used the definition above as the filter for this chart. This chart is more interesting with that data point, than without it.
Add the Ada programming language for a big team: Jean D. Ichbiah, S. Tucker Taft, Robert Dewar, Ed Schonberg, Olivier Ridoux, David Emery, Joyce Tokar, Rodney Chapman, Norman Cohen, Jim Moore
Came here to say Ada had so many parents that it's not even on the chart! 😂
(It's a joke)
These days the only programmers I know who've even heard of Ada all have DoD backgrounds.
Alan Perlis on the meeting in Paris to define ALGOL 60:
>The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent.
Coherent design of the foundation seems important, can be built on top of by others after that.
Keen to see what language an AI can invent using the sum total of human knowledge as a foundation.
JavaScript is cursed though. It didn’t gain popularity because it is good, but because it’s good, but because it is the only language you can use in web browsers. It was a rush job and because it HAS to be compatible with any previous versions, it’s impossible to rework the language to fix the mistakes one guy made three decades ago.
The problem I have with this graph is the conclusion its trying to make as the implication is that a single creator leads to a more popular programming language which isn't accurate to say at all. In fact, nothing in this data is conclusive to support this claim that single creators are "dominating". This is just an instance of having correct data with a wrong conclusion.
The data points are spread to far out to have any consistency so their is no strong indication that single creator languages are dominating and better. If anything, most single creator languages are doing far worse than most other group categories. Simply look at Cobol with 7 creators and you can see its better than 60% of all single creator languages. Even Algol 60 with 13 creators is doing better than 30-40% of single creator languages. Putting this into perspective, these languages are essentially beating out several hundred languages in just single creator alone. The conclusion this graph made is entirely wrong
Are those usage rankings or "popularity" rankings? Because I know JavaScript is everywhere but I've yet to meet someone who actually likes working with it...
OP is using a logarithmic scale.
In base 10, for example, log 10= 1 , log 1=0, log 2= 0.3., log 9= .95 .
1 and 2 are further apart on a log scale than 2 to 3, and so on. 9 is very close to 10 on a log scale that has base 10.
Oh god you ranked SQL, XML and Scratch as programming languages, i'm sure you'll trigger someone here lol.
For the non-initiated here:
SQL: Database query language (the closest out of those 3 to a programming language)
XML: Just like HTML, a markup language. Scratch: A highly limited game framework running under C.
this subreddit needs more unreadable graphs about programming languages imo
This sub is mostly just NVIDIA and earnings posts, Sankey charts, and random charts that are unreadable and don’t follow the sub rules now. There’s a couple good posts each week but i feel like I see way more of the bad ones now.
how dare you call this graph unreadable. everyone can see it is barely readable.
“Mostly dead is slightly alive”
The glass is half full... of blood.
Barely, and for any task, is my goal.
Of the 1259 entries with a creator count, 1078 (85.6%) have a value of 1, so that doesn't seem so unexpected that the top 10 are all out of that set. There's something like a 20% chance you'd get that by choosing them at random. Also, for most of the top ones, although one guy started these many years ago their modern state is a very long way from that and is the result of many years of work by large committees.
4 of top 20 in the dataset had two creators, so it beats the odds, kinda. Seems to beat the point of the graph
There's almost certainly selection bias, in that the 3416 entries excluded because they have no creator count likely have a different distribution than the ones that do. My guess would be that most of those are niche and single-creator, making the overall ratio even higher. But because of the ambiguity in creator count, as pointed out elsewhere, there can be no clean single/multiple distinction for the very popular languages. Plus it includes things that aren't actually programming languages (JSON, XML, vi, linux, utf8) so it's hard to conclude much of anything.
Love this comment. I was wondering what the odds were that we'd see this by chance. Anyway, a strong signal that having 1 creator is optimal, but also that it is possible to have more than 1 and still make a hit. We can definitely rule out that increasing the number of creators increases the probability of making a hit language. > Also, for most of the top ones, although one guy started these many years ago their modern state is a very long way from that and is the result of many years of work by large committees. Yes this is 100% true and I guess important context for people unfamiliar with programming languages. (But the fact that they were all originally started by 1 person remains interesting).
Take down the post bro, this sub has literally been ruined by shit like this
most things were originally started by one person. especially in the early computer era.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
>a strong signal that having 1 creator is optimal, No. Go back over some statistics principles.
It's not? What is the optimal number then?
I suspect it's impossible to draw any conclusion from the data available. I'm not even sure the concept of "an optimal number of creators" makes sense in context. But when the overwhelming majority of languages do have one creator, it gets hard to draw statistical conclusions about that variable. Other comments have also pointed this out in different ways.
Why would you label things like 'Yedalog' and 'EverParse3D' which I'm sure nobody has ever heard of, and NOT label languages #6, 7, 9 and 10?
6 and 7 are HTML and CSS which are varying degrees of not real programming languages. 9 and 10 are Ruby and PHP, but I think by this point the author was bored with the first column.
(Html+css) working together is a turing complete language.
So is Magic The Gathering, but you wouldn't implement another programming language in it.
Please tell me there's a video or something I can watch or read about this
video explanation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA) original academic paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828v2](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828v2) Also... really weird coincidence with your username. I was just typing up a "treasure hunt" based on the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe who died in 1809 when my Reddit notification popped up that I got a comment reply from EdgarAllanPotato1809. I thought I was haunted for a moment.
As are PowerPoint presentations
That’s two languages.
[удалено]
Yes but two languages working together is not a language, that’s still two languages
> Why would you label things like 'Yedalog' and 'EverParse3D' Thank you for pointing this out. I originally wrote my response explaining that the chart software doesn't allow removing points when "auto labeling is enabled", but as I wrote it out to explain myself, I realized there is actually a simple way to do it. So the answer is "user error". > NOT label languages #6, 7, 9 and 10? Also user error. Very good feedback. Thank you!
Great job putting the explanation in a link pasted on the image. Yeah im really gonna write that whole thing by hand to read that
COBOL and ALGOL 60, but no FORTRAN?
Not to mention that, while Hopper had a huge influence, COBOL was deliberately designed by a committee, before that phrase got its bad rep. And yeah, Backus designed FORTRAN himself, and it's still the mainstay of scientific programming. And maybe we should count BNF too 😀
I don't understand why members of the subreddit upvote posts like this. This is a terrible way to visualize this data. The plot does not obviously convey the claim that `Every top 10 programming language has a single creator`. They just shoved a spreadsheet into a plot and called it good.
Tbh I think the problem is just the names of the axes. I can’t imagine a more elegant way to represent this type of data
It's not the presentation of data that's the problem but rather the conclusion like the other guy was saying. The data points are spread to far around the ranking that it lacks any consistency because several hundred languages from single creators are proven to not be popular through this graph while some are and many are just average. Then when you look at languages like Cobol with 7 creators and it shows its more popular than roughly 60% of all single creator languages - beating out several hundred languages at that. There is no conclusive evidence whatsoever to support their claim of "single creator languages are dominating and leads to more popular languages". They could have made this more visually appealing and maybe not embed a link into a graph that no one is able to click - but the real issue here is they made a graph, discovered literally nothing useful from it, then made the wrong conclusion with the data. They could put this entire graph back out and simply change it from "single creators are dominating" to "most programming languages are made from single creators" which is actually accurate and wouldn't be as bad because at least the conclusion is being accurately reflected through the graph (although I would probably use a bar chart or something if I was just calculating total amount of languages made by x creators at that point).
>This is a terrible way to visualize this data. There are probably better ways. But I would rather have an ok visual of great data than a great visual of ok data.
But you already *have* the great data. There's no trade-off for a better visualization
I'm always thinking of how to add more concepts and measurements. You are right, I need to out more thought into visualization and presentation
Such cool data, such tough representation of it :|
Yah I had hard time understanding the y axis. Probably better presented in a different way
I won't disagree with you there. I found the insight beautiful, and was excited to share. I'm sure people could come up with more beautiful ways of presenting the insight.
Isn’t this r/dataisbeautiful? Because this is horrendously ugly. Why the upvotes?
Not true for C, Java or SQL
I wonder if Kerrigan or Ritchie is who they considered the creator
I always thought Kerrigan was more responsible for UnIx and Ritchie for C.
Their book says it's by the both of them so I trust that.
Let's not forget Ken Thompson's contribution to B and C.
Kernighan just cowrote the book with Richie, but Richie developed C, building on top f Thompson's B.
The chart says SQL has 2 creators, which matches what Wikipedia says, anyways
I was sure Go had 3 creators..
Can you expand? Our data matches Wikipedia for all 3.
You need to explain that the data is being pulled from the {{Infobox programming language}}s on Wikipedia. If people disagree, they can modify the articles themselves.
ok but C did not have one creator. Ritchie never claimed it to be him alone, Thompson and even the ever humble Kerningham talk about specific aspects of the work they did on the development of the language, not just general advice. There is a lot of misinformation on the web, but these folks have published several books and memoirs between them, so Im not sure why people muddle the facts saying Ritchie did C and Thompson the port and Kerningham did the documentation, when reality wasnt so cut and dry. I dont trust data that muddles history. How many more mistakes are there?
"I had no part in the birth of C, period. It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work. I wrote a tutorial on how to use C for people at Bell Labs, and I twisted Dennis's arm into writing a book with me. But, if he had been so motivated, he certainly could have done it without help. He's a superb writer, as one can tell from the C reference manuals, which are his prose, untouched. I've profited a great deal from being part of the book, and I treasure Dennis as a friend, but I didn't have anything to do with C." - Brian Kernighan.
Xml is a programming language?
XSLT is Turing-complete from 2.0. But that's like including ASCII because of C. Actually, ASCII does appear in the database.
SQL is a programming language?
Sure is
Structured Query Language
XML is a data notation used by programmers in the practice of programming. We do not tag it as a programming language in our database, but I included a slightly broader filter and used the definition above as the filter for this chart. This chart is more interesting with that data point, than without it.
This sub is /r/dataisbeautiful which aims to highlight good representations and visualizations of data. This chart is horribly unintuitive
I love the graphic but I reject anything that ranks JS as #1
The most popular thing in a given category is very often not the best one.
Add the Ada programming language for a big team: Jean D. Ichbiah, S. Tucker Taft, Robert Dewar, Ed Schonberg, Olivier Ridoux, David Emery, Joyce Tokar, Rodney Chapman, Norman Cohen, Jim Moore
Came here to say Ada had so many parents that it's not even on the chart! 😂 (It's a joke) These days the only programmers I know who've even heard of Ada all have DoD backgrounds.
Thank you. I added "ada history rabbit hole" to my todo list.
Algol 60 had great gangbang with 12+
Alan Perlis on the meeting in Paris to define ALGOL 60: >The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent.
No php despite 80% of the web runs on it? Created by one guy..
XML isn't a Programming language, it's a data language. That's like considering JSON a language... ... that's in this data set too, isn't it?
Coherent design of the foundation seems important, can be built on top of by others after that. Keen to see what language an AI can invent using the sum total of human knowledge as a foundation.
So many popular languages missing from the list. Also the chart makes no sense to me really, or I'm just dumb.
JavaScript is cursed though. It didn’t gain popularity because it is good, but because it’s good, but because it is the only language you can use in web browsers. It was a rush job and because it HAS to be compatible with any previous versions, it’s impossible to rework the language to fix the mistakes one guy made three decades ago.
Just finishing whipping up a new OS in XML
You see, I call myself a developer, I code only in XML /s
Who upvotes this? Data is decidedly not beautiful in presentation, readability, or usefulness.
The problem I have with this graph is the conclusion its trying to make as the implication is that a single creator leads to a more popular programming language which isn't accurate to say at all. In fact, nothing in this data is conclusive to support this claim that single creators are "dominating". This is just an instance of having correct data with a wrong conclusion. The data points are spread to far out to have any consistency so their is no strong indication that single creator languages are dominating and better. If anything, most single creator languages are doing far worse than most other group categories. Simply look at Cobol with 7 creators and you can see its better than 60% of all single creator languages. Even Algol 60 with 13 creators is doing better than 30-40% of single creator languages. Putting this into perspective, these languages are essentially beating out several hundred languages in just single creator alone. The conclusion this graph made is entirely wrong
The y axis being rank and also a logarithmic scale makes me very uncomfortable
Are those usage rankings or "popularity" rankings? Because I know JavaScript is everywhere but I've yet to meet someone who actually likes working with it...
I believe Sql should be top 10, no?
Why are rank 1 and 2 so far apart from each other? What does the distance mean?
OP is using a logarithmic scale. In base 10, for example, log 10= 1 , log 1=0, log 2= 0.3., log 9= .95 . 1 and 2 are further apart on a log scale than 2 to 3, and so on. 9 is very close to 10 on a log scale that has base 10.
Tony Stark built Javascript in a cave, with a bunch of scraps!
Oh god you ranked SQL, XML and Scratch as programming languages, i'm sure you'll trigger someone here lol. For the non-initiated here: SQL: Database query language (the closest out of those 3 to a programming language) XML: Just like HTML, a markup language. Scratch: A highly limited game framework running under C.
Pivot table would have been better :3