As I build up my database of programming languages I hope to be able to answer questions like:

is the rate of new language creation accelerating, slowing down, or constant?

what spurs the creation of new programming languages?

can we predict how many new languages will be released next year? in 5 years? in 10 years?

At the moment I am tracking 533 computer languages and I currently have creation years for more than half of those, including for 271 of the most popular ones.

Here is a simple line graph of the cumulative number of languages I have by year.

I will wait until I have more data to do more serious analysis (for example: the dip in the growth rate toward the end is likely due to my incomplete dataset and not indicative of a trend change).

But until I can provide a more comprehensive analysis, I thought I’d share my first look.

Update (12/10/2017): a number of readers have pointed out that some of the languages on this list are not programming languages. Future posts like this will be sure to exclude those.

Data used in this article as csv:

language,releaseYear plankalkul,1948 g-code,1950 flow-matic,1955 regex,1956 fortran,1957 lisp,1958 algol,1958 cobol,1959 ibm-rpg,1959 mad,1959 jovial,1960 sako,1960 si,1960 teco,1963 ascii,1963 apl,1964 basic,1964 pl-i,1964 simula,1965 bcpl,1966 mumps,1966 logo,1967 spss,1968 b,1969 gml,1969 pascal,1970 forth,1970 scheme,1970 isbn,1970 lse,1971 c,1972 prolog,1972 smalltalk,1972 intercal,1972 ml,1973 sql,1974 diff,1974 sed,1974 tcp,1974 z-notation,1974 lex,1975 yacc,1975 sas,1976 s,1976 awk,1977 bourne-shell,1977 idl,1977 m4,1977 datalog,1977 pearl,1977 modula-2,1978 tex,1978 x86,1978 dbase,1979 ada,1980 scribe,1980 udp,1980 karel,1981 maple,1982 postscript,1982 turing,1982 abap,1983 vhdl,1983 turbo-pascal,1983 matlab,1984 objective-c,1984 transact-sql,1984 verilog,1984 common-lisp,1984 rpl,1984 asn-1,1984 simulink,1984 cpp,1985 clipper,1985 stata,1985 ampl,1985 arm,1985 bibtex,1985 bison,1985 ia-32,1985 latex,1985 mips,1985 erlang,1986 labview,1986 oberon,1986 eiffel,1986 fjolnir,1986 gas,1986 gdb,1986 gnuplot,1986 mathcad,1986 object-pascal,1986 sgml,1986 perl,1987 sparc,1987 unicode,1987 wolfram,1988 mathematica,1988 octave,1988 tcl,1988 picolisp,1988 bash,1989 coq,1989 http,1989 z-shell,1990 haskell,1990 j,1990 scilab,1990 pl-sql,1991 python,1991 visualbasic,1991 qbasic,1991 antlr,1992 gzip,1992 opengl,1992 powerpc,1992 lua,1993 r,1993 k,1993 applescript,1993 brainfuck,1993 html,1993 pdf,1993 utf-8,1993 vba,1993 cilk,1994 racket,1994 delphi,1995 java,1995 javascript,1995 php,1995 ruby,1995 visual-foxpro,1995 cfml,1995 mysql,1995 qt,1995 vbscript,1996 ocaml,1996 asp,1996 css,1996 drakon,1996 jscript,1996 lilypond,1996 postgresql,1996 puredata,1996 rest,1996 squeak,1996 supercollider,1996 uml,1996 xml,1996 c--,1997 mmx,1997 modelica,1997 rdf,1997 rpm,1997 curl,1998 actionscript,1998 soap,1998 vml,1998 vvvv,1998 autoit,1999 asterisk,1999 netlogo,1999 tom-oopl,1999 unlambda,1999 xpath,1999 alice,2000 csharp,2000 cmake,2000 drupal,2000 geo-ml,2000 sqlite,2000 subversion,2000 wsdl,2000 xbl,2000 d,2001 visualbasicnet,2001 processing,2001 json,2001 nsis,2001 protobuf,2001 svg,2001 tinyc,2001 yaml,2001 scratch,2002 gosu,2002 jsharp,2002 restructuredtext,2002 textile,2002 groovy,2003 boo,2003 autohotkey,2003 q,2003 amqp,2003 llvmir,2003 sawzall,2003 whitespace,2003 wordpress,2003 scala,2004 asymptote,2004 markdown,2004 nginx,2004 owl,2004 solr,2004 tiddlywiki,2004 fsharp,2005 sagemath,2005 django,2005 git,2005 haxe,2005 linotte,2005 mercurial,2005 mql,2005 puppet,2005 rails,2005 powershell,2006 aws,2006 hexagon,2006 jquery,2006 ooxml,2006 sass,2006 scss,2006 vala,2006 wml,2006 yii,2006 apex,2007 clojure,2007 cuda,2007 cython,2007 linq,2007 lolcode,2007 thrift,2007 xcore,2007 xquery,2007 nim,2008 geojson,2008 pandas,2008 pig,2008 pure,2008 sparql,2008 umple,2008 go,2009 coffeescript,2009 less,2009 mongodb,2009 opencl,2009 redis,2009 rust,2010 azure,2010 risc-v,2010 dart,2011 kotlin,2011 elixir,2011 google-cloud,2011 schemaorg,2011 stripe,2011 swagger,2011 webgl,2011 julia,2012 elm,2012 qalb,2012 typescript,2012 asmjs,2013 ats,2013 crystal,2014 hack,2014 swift,2014 idris,2014 solidity,2014 graphql,2015 webassembly,2015

Reproducibility Notes: The data in this post comes from the CodeLani database. It is possible to build a continually updating version of this article that updates as more data comes in.