December 11, 2017 — I was looking to spruce up the walls with some interesting posters and found a few well designed visuals.

This poster by O'Reilly is well colored and looks great printed. It's big though. Visualizes 66 languages. Data stops at 2004.

GitHut's interactive visualization is fun to explore and contains relatively up to date information on language popularity. I printed a screenshot. Visualizes 49 languages. Data ends in 2014.

Exploring Data's D3 interactive visualization shows related languages and prints are available for purchase. Visualizes 1220 languages. Data up to 2014.

Sammet's chart is one of the first visualizations of the programming language landscape on record. I printed the image. Visualizes 167 languages. Published in 1972.

Sammet's book cover is a nice artistic visualization from the early days of programming. I printed the image. Visualizes 117 languages. Published in 1969.

Is there a great visualization I am missing? Submit a pull request.

This post currently has low reproducibility. I do not have an objective measure of "best". The data collection procedure employed consisted of ad hoc searches through programming books as well as web searches.

Data used in this article as csv: