A Brief History of Open Source Code

Learn about the last 20 years of collaborative software development, language relationships, and the current state of the art with A Brief History of Open Source Code infographic. Kinvey, a company that helps its clients create mobile apps, published the infographic designed by Beutler Ink back in 2013. For more in-depth reading, check out this article at Read Write.

We were able to visualize the percentage of total commits in a given quarter for the top 16 programming languages from 1993 until today. We hope you’ll find this image—a provocative pattern of dips and spikes—to be as interesting as we do. It truly shows how dynamic the world of programming is. We’ve also included a few graphs on other interesting data points: total number of languages by year, average lines of code per commit, and tracking which languages influenced the development of others.

There is good use of colors and charts to tell the story of the 16 different source code languages. No numbers were needed to show the popularity of each language, only distances between the colors. The colors are similar, but not to the point where we would have trouble telling them apart. I like the gradual color gradient in the infographic. Too many different colors would make the graphic look too busy.  

Found on http://readwrite.com