The periodic table of programming languages visualizes the evolution of popular programming languages over time. It arranges languages by decade in rows, with the earliest mechanical systems in the top row from the 1830s-1950s. Each cell represents a language and is color coded by its original or primary programming paradigm such as imperative, functional, object oriented, and concurrent. The table tracks the emergence and proliferation of languages from the earliest days of computing to modern languages in the 2000s row.

1. THE PERIODIC TABLE OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
© Paul Bowler
A E
1 2
Analytical Engine
Visualisation of the evolution of popular programming languages ENIAC Short
Order Code Code
Mechanical Functional
Ft Ag Cb L
3 4 5 6
Imperative Dynamic
Fortran ALGOL Object Oriented Concurrent COBAL LISP
Scripting Multi-paradigm
Sn Bs Sm P B Lg
7 8 9 10 11 12
Declarative
SNOWBOL BASIC Simula PL/1 B LOGO
Fo Pc St Sq Pg C M Ml Sc
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Forth Pascal Smalltalk SQL Prolog C Modula ML Scheme
Ad Cp Ef Oc Ps Tc Ht Pl Cl Er
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Ada C++ Eiffel Objective C PostScript Tcl HyperTalk Perl Common LISP Erlang
Vb Dp Jv Py As Cf Js Pp Fs Hk
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Visual BASIC Delphi Java Python AppleScript Coldfusion JavaScript PHP F# Haskel
Each row represents roughly a decade, The colours denote the programming
Cs Sl Gv Rb G Cj
starting on the second row with the 1950's 42 43 44 45 46 47 paradigm that the language in question
up to the 2000's on the final row. The first originally supported or the primary
row is pre-1950 with the two mechanical paradigm for which it is known. Some
programming systems from which all others languages may have evolved to support
have evolved - the first from around 1837 C# Scala Groovy Ruby GO Clojure
other paradigms over time which are not
created by Charles Babbage and Ada shown.
Lovelace.