And I bet this is based in opinion and not any sort of scientific understanding because you put assembly as an obsolete language…
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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"Obsolete Lang" is more of a looks category, and back then most programming languages were not much dissimilar from it. Basically Assembly had to stay unstructured due to how CPUs work, while the industry moved on.
SQL isn't a toy language, it's a domain specific language.
scala?
It's somehow both a nu lang and an obsolete lang.
The only way Assembly will be obsolete is if there were no new chips processor models being created.
Every time a new architecture or a new instruction group is announced, it has to be bootstrapped into the C compiler.
i like how you've managed to include just a single non-procedural language, and it's the most interesting one by far, and you're calling it obsolete. says a lot.
Prolog, right? I really love it
How is cobol toy wasn't it made for military?
ngl I'm pretty mad right now
Where Perl?
Outside the chart. Somewhere far above the image
If everything written in those "obsolete" languages suddenly disappeared, the whole world would go dark.
That doesn't stop them from being obsolete, it just means that people who have the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality can get fucked.
System vs Toy?
AKA: How to annoy a bunch of computer nerds very quickly....
Make one for Linux distros next!!!
By being wildly wrong you mean?
You say "wildly wrong", they say "incentivizing engagement".
So rage bait?
Precisely. Getting people upset is the foremost technique to farm engagement on social media. Sites such as Facebook even deliberately altered their algorithms to show content that will anger readers because it works so well to keep them invested.
Engagement bait is omnipresent and really obvious once you learn to spot it - even something as innocuous as one or two "accidental" typos in a meme to get people into the comments section.
You could rent yourself to translate corporate-speak in email and meetings
Typescript, a language. Hah.
Assembly being obsolete has to be the funniest joke in here. It fundamentally never will be even if its use is niche
...and C++ being obsolete is the second funniest.
It is clearly surpassed by C though this chart seems to have missed that fact.
How are you defining "Obsolete" vs "Nu"?
e.g. Brainfuck from 1993 is all the way to Nu, while D (2001) and Rust (2012) are less "Nu"?
Also, what the hell is "nu" supposed to mean?
Nude 😳
OP probably lived through the mid-1990s rise of “nu-metal” bands like Linkin Park
Maybe short for "Nouveau".
The "ouvea" being removed:P
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Yeah, the axes on this are weird, why would the opposite of a systems language be a toy language? And why is Lua, a very popular and commonly used language in tons of stuff, a "toy"? And Lua is a nu Lang? It's older than Java, maybe it just feels newer because each release isn't necessarily backwards compatible?
Also Python as a toy lang and somehow more "nu" than Java despite Java being younger?
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It wouldn’t be a good compass if nobody had strong issues with it:
- System vs Toy is not opposed to each other. Should have been system vs abstract or useful vs toy or whatever
- Where LISP? Best language missing makes graph bad
Edit: before people tell me there’s already ‘obsolete’ on the graph, no, there’s loads of obsolete languages that are still useful, and many more new languages that are either built for fun or not used for sad or good reasons.
Edit2: I’m also halfway sure that brainfuck is older than rust (but don’t wanna look it up). But if that’s true your axis mean several things at once anyway and you should feel bad (not really though).
I literally opened it looking for Lisp and dismissed the whole thing when I realized its not there
Haskell's also not there. I was ready to criticize any quadrant it was put in heh. But that's probably mostly because the axes are kinda bad.
Did you just note Typescript, a superset of JavaScript that needs to be compiled into it, as closer to the system?
Also does it technically constitute a language? That feels like a stretch too.
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Curious how you decided what goes where, I'd hardly consider SQL a "Toy Lang" as opposed to a "System Lang"
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COBOL is about as far from a "toy" as I can imagine. Almost everything corpo runs on it at some level.
And almost no one writes it for fun.
It's missing another axis, where else is Scott Lang gonna fit?
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