A Categorization of Programming Languages

There are many ways to categorize a given set of things. I find it useful to place today’s major general-purpose programming languages (and then some I added because I find them interesting) in three dimensions:

• x-axis: type system – from weak dynamic typings, progressing to strong dynamic typing (which doesn’t make that much of a difference) on the left, to compile-time checked static typings like C and Java and finally much more expressive static typings like Hindley–Milner type systems on the right.
• y-axis: degree to which a language is conductive to writing code in a functional style – from not at all (imperative paradigm) at the bottom, to multi-paradigm languages in the middle and finally purely functional languages at the top.
• color-code: of all the languages shown, only three have no runtime-overhead due to garbage collection: C, C++ and Rust. (Swift is using ARC, which is not strictly speaking garbage collection, but still comes with some runtime overhead.) The others either target a common runtime system (JVM, .NET, Erlang runtime), have their language-specific runtime (JavaScript or compile-to-JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP), or bundle the runtime with each binary (Go, Haskell).

Of course, these are only what I find are the three major technical considerations. When picking a language for a specific project, there are also a lot of soft factors to consider, like community and ecosystem, experience of the team, etc.