Punctuated equilibrium in the large-scale evolution of programming languages

Abstract

The analogies and differences between biological and cultural evolution have been explored by evolutionary biologists, historians, engineers and linguists alike. Two well-known domains of cultural change are language and technology. Both share some traits relating the evolution of species, but technological change is very difficult to study. A major challenge in our way towards a scientific theory of technological evolution is how to properly define evolutionary trees or clades and how to weight the role played by horizontal transfer of information. Here, we study the large-scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modelling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path.

Exploring, exploiting and evolving diversity of aquatic ecosystem models: a community perspective

“…Like biodiversity, model diversity can be organized in taxonomic structures to classify models. Using Wikipedia as a reference, such a taxonomic study has been done already for programming languages and showed a phylogenetic tree with new programming languages emerging from different elements of earlier programming languages (Valverde and Solé 2015). A similar study for AEMs is intriguing, but is beyond this study.…”

Deep Transitions: Emergence, Acceleration, Stabilization and Directionality

“…The detection and patterning of these ruptures and continuities invites methodological experimentation, e.g. the use of phylogenetic methods (Mesoudi, 2011;Valverde and Solé, 2015), Big Data analytics (Manning, 2013) or scientometric techniques (Rotolo et al, 2015). In particular, a quantitative mapping of patterns in the evolution of rules and meta-rules is a promising research avenue as both MLP and TEP literatures have so far identified regimes and techno-economic paradigms on the basis of qualitative interpretation of historical data, resulting in a certain lack of analytical rigour.…”

Major transitions in information technology

“…There are many examples of hand-made diagrams of the evolution of programming languages but it is unclear how to obtain evolutionary trees in the absence of a 'cultural genome'. Recently, we have proposed a method to reconstruct these cultural phylogenies using networks of historical influences [62]. This network is an instance of directed graph G ¼ (V, E) formed by the set of programming languages V and a set E of influence links among them.…”