Sideways
A reader pointed this language table out to me, along with this comment:
This diagram is interesting. Smalltalk is very particular in that there are only 2 influences shown, and after that linear development. Also notice how nothing has changed in the world of languages in the past 7 years. I'd bet that's when all the other languages incorporated most of ST's features in a bastardized way.
Food for thought.
Comments
[gabriele renzi] February 4, 2005 4:45:38.962
I won't say there were no changes in the last seven years, probably they are just not reflected in the table :)
As an example, Slate, Nemerle and Perl6 showed a switch from smalltalkish feature ripping to lispish feature ripping, by including macro support. Also a renewed interest in concurrency showed the appeal of languages like AliceML. But this will need some more year to appear in the table :)
A more interesting/fun (and obviously not actually "real") image is, imo, the "every language fixes something" one as found on the c2 wiki: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/images/LF02.png
Apples & Oranges
[Mike Brazinski] February 4, 2005 10:53:54.289
The changes for Java are really misrepresented, in particular past JDK 1.4. There have only been a few changes in the Java Language itself. JDK 1.2 introduced the concept of inner classes, JDK 1.4 added the "assert" keyword and major language features were added in Java 5. This chart is showing each revision, including many minor ones, as language changes. If Smalltalk had a blip for each time the class libraries have been updated, there would be a blip for each and every version of Visualworks, VisualAge, Squeak, and so on.