Template talk:List of programming languages

Contents

1 Template init script effects 2 Basing list on popularity 3 SAS 4 IDL 5 Wikipedia-based popularity measure 6 An alternative to one list 7 Why languages should be added to list 8 Categorizing languages genetically

Template init script effects

Uh, the Template initialization script "moved" this here, and now it's disappeared... where's it gone? Dysprosia 22:33, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Somehow Lisp went missing, too. I put it back. --FOo 02:04, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Basing list on popularity

I just updated the languages list, as I was concerned that the list included several "might as well be dead" languages and excluded a few currently popular ones, like C# and JavaScript (!!). The best site I knew of that performed some kind of quasi-scientific survey of languages was [1] (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm), so I used its top-20 list to revamp the list here. I understand that some will disagree that this site provides the best survey, but the underlying thought behind the changes is that the list should be streamlined and based on popularity. I'd be happy to see a more scientific survey utilized to determine what should be in the list. -- Stevietheman 16:39, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's fine to exclude "might as well be dead" languages, but to exclude languages that are being used to this day, such as Ruby, PostScript, Objective-C, ML, and so on, on the basis of popularity, is not wise. An encyclopedia reflects fact, not popularity. Dysprosia 04:28, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

When popularity is measured, the list can be kept manageable to a popularity "cut-off". By including all languages that exist "in fact", there's no limit, and the list can easily get out of hand. I'm going to have to revert back. -- Stevietheman 04:40, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Further, the List of programming languages includes all languages that exist, so the template list need not have the same requirement. -- Stevietheman 04:50, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I never said to include all languages that exist. I said all languages that are being used currently, and then this leads to the question that perhaps having such a narrow margin to list only 20 is too restrictive. There is no real need to keep things so slim. Dysprosia 04:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The problem is "all languages being used currently" opens the door to too many arguments. We should find a popularity standard instead and take the top so-many (I chose 20 as an arbitrary start, but a different number might work as well). Further, there is indeed a real need to keep things "so slim"--there's no point in having an all-inclusive list of current languages when the user can go to the whole list. I would think most readers don't want all that clutter. -- Stevietheman 04:59, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Adding 5 or so other important programming languges doesn't quite make the template that cluttered, to me. Popularity shouldn't be the disciminating measure either: to me, we should have the most interesting and technologically relevant programming languages listed here. The list of 20 helps, but, according to that measure, has a lot of omissions. Dysprosia 05:11, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

But those are "omissions of languages important to you". Then, comes along somebody else with their list, then another, then another, ad nauseum. Using a standard removes emotions from the equation. That said, if the popularity cut-off is extended to 25, I know at least Postscript from your list would get added. -- Stevietheman 05:15, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

No, not important to me, the measure I described is for a language to present general interest and technical relevance. For example, if we are to look at object-oriented programming, Self would be of interest and technical relevance because it goes outside and extends that paradigm in a new way. So it would be interesting for a casual reader to come across this language in the template, perhaps. This harks back to what I am saying that concrete popularity is not the best measure to judge whether an article should be in the template or not.

What might be interesting isn't encyclopedic from the standpoint of a template highlighting the more common topics. This is what templates do. I don't think we should editorialize and choose what other programmers should find interesting. They're smart enough to find those things on their own. -- Stevietheman 05:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's not about whether to include articles interesting to other programmers. Including a few links to some other interesting programming languages will be appealing to the entire target audience for the programming languages articles. Dysprosia

In regards to if people are going to come along with "their list" or not, they will do so whether it is popular or not, because they will most likely see the omission as an oversight, and not an exclusion based on one organization's popularity measure. Dysprosia 05:44, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Nothing stops anyone from browsing the entire list of languages. By choosing the most popular to put into the template (the highlights listing), we are predicting what languages many of the readers will be interested in. Also, I don't have any relationship with the organization that measures popularity, so I would be happy to entertain looking at a different source, as long as they are producing something of higher quality. -- Stevietheman 05:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Popularity does not always imply an interesting article. I'm getting tired of arguing about this (I won't re-revert however). If we must have a measure of popularity, how about taking the number of users who committed edits to each article on each programming language? Dysprosia 06:03, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I do actually understand the thrust of your arguments. However, I would rather have an independent measure of popularity--your measure can be skewed by those who are passionate about particular languages. How about a compromise? Let's go from "top 20" to "top 26"--this will automatically include Postscript and Ruby, as well as four others (MATLAB, RPG, ABAP, Scheme). However, ML is ranked #37 and Objective-C #43--but if they rise up later, we could include them. Again, if a better popularity index can be found, it should be considered in place of the one we're currently using. -- Stevietheman 14:30, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The measure I proposed shouldn't be skewed, since it measures the number of people that are interested in the language, and thus should be a rough measure of popularity, since we measure the number of users who contributed and not the raw number of edits.

I'm just saying that somebody could play games with this measurement by getting their friends to do edits or by creating sock puppets for the same purpose. Further, I think it would be a _lot_ more work for us to track the popularity this way, as it would require visits to all the language pages on a periodic basis. On the other hand, the current popularity measurement is on one page, and it's based on Google and Yahoo results (certainly these are much harder to skew based on the formula). Perhaps I'm lazy, but I certainly don't want to do the work of reviewing contributions on all the language pages. -- Stevietheman 19:44, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Not to generate the initial list, since until this conversation, sockpuppetry has had no motivation in plainly editing the pages. I've got a script and the preliminary results for some languages, if you are interested in this measure. Dysprosia 06:50, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sure, I'm interested in seeing what you've done. But, please create a new section to post your results, as the nesting here is getting out of control.  :) -- Stevietheman 15:06, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Im any case, I wouldn't call MATLAB a programming language, but more a language for computer algebra (you can't compile and run independent MATLAB scripts), though widening the cutoff to 26 shouldn't cause problems. This and other reasons is why I doubt the accuracy and the relevance of the independent programming language measure. Dysprosia 19:30, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I likewise feel funny about including MATLAB, but mainly just because I had never run into it myself. But apparently, it's being used in a significant manner out there. But if you know of a better independent measurement, we should use that. Perhaps we should just go with the TIOBE index for now, but change it to something else later if something better is discovered.

SAS

Re: SAS, SAS is the central software product and language from SAS Institute and is indeed widely used. -- Stevietheman 04:48, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

An article should be written on the language, not the institute. Dysprosia 04:52, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. But until then, SAS Institute is the closest thing. And, since I'm not an expert on SAS, I'll let somebody else do the deed. -- Stevietheman 04:59, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This shouldn't be on the list. The list is for programming languages not software packages and especially not the institutes that produce them. Plus there are other packages that are used much more than SAS for statistical analysis. - DNewhall

SAS is not a big player in the individual micro world, with it's thousand dollar a year license strategy, but remains hugely popular in big biz and remains the lingua franca of the FDA. I see somebody did start a SAS language page, now we'll just move the remaining bits over from the SAS Institute page, although after you've done that there is barely enough left to leave a page on its own, so might as well just move the entire SAS Institute as a subsection of the SAS language page, and we're back where we started, but with a different page title. Gzuckier 16:09, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

IDL

IDL best describes the language by RSI, because it is an actual language, whilst an "interface description language" just describes a generic term. This is why I changed the link to IDL to point to the language created by IDL, and not to the generic term. Dysprosia 19:30, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think this needs to go through more discussion than just between you and me. Interface description language, even though it's generic, has a generally common structure throughout its variants, and I believe is much more commonly used than the other IDL. However, I understand why this would be in contention, so, let's say we hear from others before we jump to a conclusion.

If it appears on the TIOBE index, it isn't going to indicate a group or family of programming languages, but the IDL programming language itself. If you want to hear from others, sure. Dysprosia 06:40, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'll ask the guy who runs the index to clarify this, and I'll report back. -- Stevietheman 15:06, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Another thought: SQL appears on the TIOBE index, rather than specific variants like Oracle's PL/SQL. It has a similar "problem" as that of IDL (perhaps even worse), as there is a SQL standard, but the various SQL implementations are wildly different. -- Stevietheman 15:21, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

But an "Interface description language" != RSI's "Interactive data language". The SQL implementation issue however still is an important one. Dysprosia 01:07, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I understand they're not the same thing. That's not in dispute. However, the first IDL is (as far as I know) far more widely known than the second IDL, even if it's generic. Heck, you could argue Pascal is generic due to the many variations for it. "Interface description language" is similar enough among its implementations to make it a real language to be listed amongst programming languages. -- Stevietheman 02:53, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That's not what I was saying. Regardless, could you perhaps give me an example of an interface description language? The interface description language article doesn't seem to give one, but merely says that it's "part of COM, XPCOM and CORBA, and SOAP". Dysprosia 05:52, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is a "do your own research" moment. If IDL is part of all these technologies, and it is, then it's widely in use. -- Stevietheman 13:31, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't think IDL should be on the list it's kinda like putting UML up here. The list should be for "real" programming languages.

C# wasn't on the list? odd. I feel like including only language popular on some list runs contrary to the spirit of wikipedia. I thought the point was that we're intelligent and mature enough to collectively create an encyclopedia. So what is the value of this list? Is it there for people to find languages that they don't know about? If that is the case, including popular ones is not particularly productive because people are more likely to already know about them. Is it there for a quick reference? If that is the case, then perhaps we should go by number of edits or number of users editing each, or maybe page views. Personally I think a human maintained list did fine. The list was not huge, it was 3 or 4 lines? I don't think that is too big. Stevietheman, was there some particular language that was on the list that you didn't think deserved to be there? Perhaps until this is worked out fully we could include the top 50 languages, as then the ones Dysprosia mentioned would be included, yes? I just noticed below you mentioned REXX and smalltalk. I was just sitting in a college class where one of the kids was doing his project in smalltalk, and gnu smalltalk had a release a little over a month ago. I think my point is that perhaps more of the languages are still "alive" than you thought.

SeanProctor 00:43, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia-based popularity measure

BASIC_programming_language 185
PHP_programming_language 171
Java_programming_language 163
C_programming_language 161
Python_programming_language 132
Perl 119
C_Plus_Plus 116
Visual_Basic 99
JavaScript 77
Lisp_programming_language 69
SQL 67
Delphi_programming_language 61
Ada_programming_language 55
Ruby_programming_language 54
PostScript 52
Smalltalk_programming_language 46
Fortran 44
Objective-C 43
Common_Lisp 36
COBOL_programming_language 33
PL_I_programming_language 32
REXX 25
ML_programming_language 23
Self_programming_language 19
ColdFusion 18
AWK_programming_language 16
SAS_Institute 11

derived from the following (admittedly hacky) Perl script

print "@ARGV ";

while(<>)
{
   chomp;
   # clean up the contribs list
   s/^.*200[0-9]\s+//g; #Wikipedia started 2001, so no date should be before this
   s/\(.*$//g;
   s/ m ?//g;
   s/ $//g;
   s/^ //g;
   push @contributors, $_;
}

@contributors = sort @contributors;

foreach (@contributors)
{
   push @uniqd, $_ if $seen{$_} != 1 ;
   $seen{$_}=1;
}

$_ = @uniqd;
$_ = $_."\n";
print;

invoked as script.pl contribs-file, where contribs-file is a copy-and-paste from a web browser's contribution file. Dysprosia 01:22, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Interesting results, esp. with regards to REXX and Smalltalk, which in my estimation are pretty much dead (and I'm a former REXX programmer). However, I still don't understand fully why this measure is useful, as it comes from one source (Wikipedia) and is open to easy skewing (like I discussed before), while the TIOBE index pulls from web-wide Google/Yahoo results and is most likely "skew-proof". I might be talked into creating a combined index which takes both your poll and the TIOBE results into account, but that's just more work. I just feel that a global index works better than a one-source index.

I guess my basic question is: assuming there's no skewing, what makes this one-source index have more value than a global index? My guess for the answer is that programmers (theoretically) have a greater weight in making the calls with respect to Wikipedia contributions, taking into account their current technical enthusiasm as a future predictor. And with the global index, we have a measure of actual use and reference over the past year, including commercial interests. If my answers are the right ones, then a combined index might make the most sense. -- Stevietheman 01:11, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Whether the contributors are programmers themselves or not, isn't really the issue, since if a large number of different contributors contribute to an article it suggest that the article is being found independently, visited, examined, and so on. There may not be any greater or lesser value to using the Wikipedia-based index, but I think these results more accurately reflect popularity, if we must use popularity as a criterion (which I still maintain is a bad idea), plus we have the data more accesibly at hand here.

If basing the list on popularity is a "bad idea", what then is the alternative... whim? There has to be some point for having the template, and this needs to be made clear to the reader. If there's no point in it being there, then let's stop having a template. Continuing it as it was only means it will keep changing according to whims, and it won't have any meaning.

I saw no real problems with keeping the list at the length as it was before (cf [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Template:List_of_programming_languages&oldid=4473443)). Dysprosia

But there were no limits on its length, as the list is based on whim. That is indeed problematic.

Note that the template as it is doesn't mention why the languages in the list are there, and thus this ultimately becomes an invitation to continual dispute. Making it clear why the languages are there will prevent this inevitability. Saying this won't happen is burying one's head in the sand. Programmers are persnickety by nature, and they'll argue to the end of time about their favorite languages. But if there's some rhyme/reason as to what goes in the list, there should be less argument.

There hasn't been any discussion as far as I know until now to the content of the template. Dysprosia

But that discussion is inevitable. Most templates I've seen in the Wikipedia are fact-based, not whim-based. Simply having a list of "selected" languages is useless info to the reader. -- Stevietheman 13:37, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Further, who other than programmers would be contributing to articles on programming languages? Perhaps a few marketeers who want to do some commercial promotion... but really, now, let's get real here. You're arguing from a "we can't possibly make an educated guess as to who is editing these articles" when common sense would suggest they're mainly programmers who are doing the editing. Who else would know enough about them to work on them? -- Stevietheman 02:42, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'm saying that the backgrounds of the people contributing have no impact on comparing the amount of users who contribute to articles on the programming languages, and thus do not impact the popularity measure of the programming languages. Note that commercial promotion is against Wikipedia policy, and will most likely be removed, either in articles or in templates such as this one. Dysprosia 05:52, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

You're missing the point that those editing the articles are most likely programmers. And the funny thing is, programmers can sometimes go crazy over particular languages, even ones like REXX and Smalltalk that are virtually dead. They can be "popular" in your index, but not actually be popular in the wild. -- Stevietheman 13:37, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

However, there can be skewing with the TIOBE results too. Take Objective-C, for example. It's the native programming language used to program with the Cocoa frameworks. If you just search for Objective-C, you'll get stuff on the language and not on Cocoa, but if you search for Cocoa, you'll find much more content. But Cocoa is programming in Objective-C! The articles you may find on Cocoa may just not mention "Objective-C". The problem is, there are bindings to Cocoa that do not use Objective-C, and may make a simple union measure of the Cocoa and Objective-C results slightly inaccurate. Dysprosia 01:31, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This in my opinion is a decent argument for combining both indexes. Both have considerable flaws. -- Stevietheman 02:56, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

An alternative to one list

It seems to me that this list can't include all languages, or even a "reasonable" subset (FSVO reasonable). Instead, why not do something like the electronic music templates? See, for example, Electronic body music. You'd then have a list of top-level "types" of language—procedural, functional, object-oriented, etc., and then for each type, a list of languages; so C programming language would have the list of procedural languages (C, Algol, Fortran, Pascal, ...), followed by a list of type (Procedural, functional, ...); for example, in the C article:

Procedural programming languages
Ada | Algol | B | BASIC | BCPL | BLISS | C | C++ | C# | COBOL | Fortran | Modula-2 | Pascal | PL/I | REXX

Programming languages
4GL | Assembler | Authoring | Functional | Logical | Object-oriented | Procedural

Thoughts? —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 06:10, 2004 Jul 19 (UTC)

I think this is an excellent way of going about it. It provides a way of navigating to potentially all the programming language articles we have in a logical and consistent way. If they're no great disagreements, I think this is the best way of addressing the problem. Dysprosia 06:16, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I like the second box (with some refinement), although the top one runs into the same problems the current one does--it lists "dead" languages and the list can ultimately become longish and based on whim. -- Stevietheman 13:29, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

What of languages that arguably fit more than one category? Take Perl, Common Lisp, or Python for instance. Some people think of Perl as a language for writing Web CGI scripts in. Some think of it as a text processing language. Some think of it as a scripting language for systems administration. It has object-oriented features, too. It is certainly many things to many people.

Common Lisp and Python are both described in their Wikipedia articles as multi-paradigm languages; that is, languages which explicitly rule out such taxonomy. Their designers have chosen to support many programming paradigms -- structured, object-oriented, functional. To pigeonhole them is to mislead the reader.

For my part, I see no problem with the old, long, alphabetical list. It may be large, but at least it can be made accurate and comprehensive. These are goals more worthy of an encyclopedia than terseness or neat artificial categories. --FOo 15:58, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Multi-paradigm languages can go into the "multi-paradigm" category, then. Why are so-called "dead" languages a problem, and which languages do you consider to be "dead"? —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 23:48, 2004 Jul 19 (UTC)

I have no objection to languages of historical interest being described as such. (Wikipedia doesn't even call Latin a "dead language".)

But! -- To say that a language is of historical interest is not to say that it is "dead", but to say that it is interesting. It is interesting for its influence on CS, on IT, on later languages, or what-have-you. It is a reason to make sure we list such languages prominently ... not a reason to discard them or to make information about them harder to find. We are encyclopedists -- we are here to preserve knowledge, not to selectively present fashionable knowledge and to conceal knowledge that simply isn't popular at the moment.

IT and CS are susceptible to fashion, just as much as music or anthropology are. We should describe the effects of fashion and popularity, but we should not (as encyclopedists) succumb to them. We should not try to make our encyclopedia into a reference of fashionable languages in order to garner attention; nor should we conceal information about unfashionable languages in order to avoid seeming "out of date". A list of languages here that has a lot of currently-unfashionable ones is not "cluttered with dead languages"; it is full of knowledge which might elsewhere go lost.

There is a place for a list of this year's most popular programming languages. It is the same as the place for this year's most popular consumer products or musical hits: the article about this year. We do not head up the article on color with today's most fashionable colors, or present today's Top 40 as an index to the category of music. Likewise, the index of programming languages should contain an index of important languages, not simply today's fashionable ones. --FOo 02:33, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I feel we should instead of having numerous boxes just stick to one and only put the most relevant languages. So languages that are both heavily used and the truly historic ones. -DNewhall

How are you going to measure "both heavily used" and "truly historic"? This is essentially the problem here. If there are no real other objections, I think I'll try this out soon. Dysprosia 14:00, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It still strikes me as odd and inappropriate that this has chiefly been not a discussion of what should go in a list, or how that list should be organized, but what should be excluded -- the unpopular, the rare, the obscure. This is an encyclopedia, and that means it should favor including facts, at the risk of being verbose, rather than excluding them. Again, we are not writing a quick reference guide to today's hottest languages; we are writing an encyclopedia. Comprehensiveness is a virtue over terseness in such a work. --FOo 15:20, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That's what I've been saying all along :) Dysprosia 01:27, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Why languages should be added to list

There seems to be a large divergence of issues regarding why languages should be on the list. Personally, I feel that we should put the most relevant languages on the list meaning the ones that affect us the most. So todays "it" language, description languages (UML,IDL, etc.), software packages, and the obscure ones should NOT be on the list. If you can justify it then it should be added.

Definitly needs to be on the list: Ada - This is the second most used system language. It is also refered to a lot in compsci literature. ALGOL - One of the most influential langauges even if it is dead. C - The most used system programming language. Still one of the most popular languages today. C++ - Probably the most used language overall today. COBOL - This was one of the oldest languages and is still use today. Common Lisp / Lisp - The original functional programming language and still the most popular language for teaching AI techniques. (should maybe list only one or the other) Delphi - VB's biggest rival. Used a lot in application programming. Eiffel - One of the most popular application programming languages. Has fairly significant influence. Fortran - The oldest surviving language, Still one of the most used in the research community. Haskell - The most used purely functional programming language. Java - Today's "it" language but seems to be popular for teaching. Javascript - Used to program webpages. Used a lot. Objective-C - Is still the most used language for Macs. Pascal - Was used heavily and still in considerable use today as a teaching language. Perl - Used a lot for system administration, biological research, and text processing. PHP - Same as Javascript in reason. PL\I - Was very notable but now dead. Postscript - One of the (arguably) most important languages seeing it controls most printers. Python - A popular multiparadigm language used in many tasks. Smalltalk - Should be on the list for being one of the most influential OO programming langauges. Still used today. Visual Basic - The most popular aplication programming language on Windows.

Should maybe be on the list: AWK - Pretty much a dead language but might still be useful for historical interest. One of the influences of Perl. C# - Another one of today's "it" languages but seems to be gaining acceptance in the Windows programming world. ColdFusion - Description similar to C# but for web content. Caml/OCaml/ML - Caml is a widely used language and ML has considerable influence. (should probaly list only one) Modula-2/Modula-3/Oberon-2 - Modula-2's the third most used systems programming language. But Oberon-2 is the more recent of the family and more well known. (shuld only have one probably) Occam - The most used language for concurrant algorithm notation. However, it's pretty obscure. Rexx - Was popular at one time but now isn't used as much. Sed - same as AWK Self - It was a notable achievment in OO language design but never caught on. SQL - This isn't technically a programming language by some definitions yet it's very widely used. - DNewhall

Categorizing languages genetically

I'd like to toss in another possibility for categorizing languages. Above it was suggested to categorize them by programming paradigms (functional, OO, etc.) but this fails for the many multi-paradigm languages. I wonder if it would work to categorize them "genetically", that is, in phyla according to common descent, e.g.:

• C language family -- C, C++, Objective-C, C#, (Java?)
• Lisp language family -- Common Lisp, Scheme, (Dylan?)
• Pascal language family -- Pascal, Delphi, Modula, Oberon, Object Pascal
• Unix shell language family -- sh, Perl, awk, sed
• ML language family -- SML, Caml, OCaml

Any language which doesn't fit a phylum (like, say, APL) gets included by itself. To distinguish the phyla from the single languages, we could either (a) set the phyla in boldface, or (b) list the phyla alphabetically first, followed by the ungrouped languages. Each language page would have the box for its language family (if it has one) as well as the box for programming languages. --FOo 15:20, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is fine by me. I was only suggesting the general style (i.e. subcategories) rather than an actual organisation scheme. —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 15:54, 2004 Jul 30 (UTC)

OK, based on this suggestion, I propose the following templates:

ML programming language family
SML | Caml | OCaml
List of programming languages

Unix shell-based language family
sh | ksh | csh | Perl | awk | sed
List of programming languages

Pascal programming language family
Pascal | Delphi | Modula | Oberon | Object Pascal
List of programming languages

C programming language family
C | C++ | Objective-C | Java | C#
List of programming languages

Lisp programming language family
Common Lisp | Scheme | Dylan
List of programming languages

Basic programming language family
Basic | Quick Basic | Visual Basic | Visual Basic .NET
List of programming languages

Please edit, add more languages, etc. —Kate | Talk 01:42, 2004 Aug 1 (UTC)

Here's the top-level template, minus links for the other templates since they would be dead: --FOo 01:58, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Programming languages and families
Basic family | C family | Lisp family | ML family | Pascal family
ALGOL | Ada | COBOL | Eiffel | Fortran | Haskell | IDL | JavaScript | PHP | Prolog | Python | Smalltalk
List of programming languages

Is it worth turning 'Basic family' etc. into links and writing either a page to describe the features of that language family, or else adding a section to the language's own article and explaining it there...? Other than that, I'll probably implement this soon, since noone seems to have any objections. — Kate | Talk 21:16, 2004 Aug 15 (UTC)

Well, would it be worth it? Instead of having one big template showing all the important languages we'd have a bunch of small ones showing languages that are already listed on each page. If you go to the OCaml page you'll easily see the Caml link, same with BASIC, C, etc. It's already fairly well organized so that you can see which languages are related to which so should we just show this information again or should we instead display other languages? First, I'd suggest we put down ALL the family templates so we can see how it's organized before we make some huge change and find that it's not organized correctly. Also, what about multiparadigm languages? Hypothetically, if you have a scripting langauge that has BASIC-like syntax do you put it with BASIC or scripting languages? -DNewhall