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AI project spotlight: Computer languages genealogy
This one is a love letter to the classic “History of Programming Languages” wall chart — the poster that draws decades of languages as branching lines of influence. The original stops in 2001, long before Swift existed, so I built an interactive recreation that runs from 1954 to 2024 and can trace SwiftUI’s bloodline all the way back to FORTRAN.
The chart holds 115 languages arranged in family bands — ALGOL, Lisp, C, functional, scripting — with curved influence lines between them. Hover a language (or anywhere along its timeline) and everything else dims except its direct parents and children; click it and its whole ancestry lights up in orange, and cmd-click stacks multiple lineages. A search box jumps straight to any language, sliders control line spacing and timeline scale, a connections filter hides weakly-linked languages, and cream versus blue nodes separate the original chart from my additions. There’s also a plain table view of every language and its parents.
The tech is as plain as it gets: one self-contained HTML file, no frameworks, no build step. The language data sits in the page as a JSON array and vanilla JavaScript renders everything as SVG — node ellipses, timeline lanes, bezier influence edges, a sticky year ruler. The monorepo’s Express server mounts it statically on Cloud Run.
An AI agent built this in two passes: one issue for the chart itself, another to move it into its own project folder with its own BRAIN.md status file — the same issue, worktree and pull-request loop everything on this site goes through.