Wednesday 23 May 2018

egg Chronology of Computer Languages 2

Another visualisation I tried with the COCL data-set was a chord diagram (revamped from the cocktail version I did a couple of years ago). Apart for realising how bad my JavaScript was back then, I discovered that chord diagrams do not make the "direction" of relationships obvious. I've added a bit of animation to try to remedy that when you hover over a language name.
I find this visualisation much more aesthetically pleasing that the rather workman-like "waterfall". The fact that the chronology is clock-like is also rather agreeable.

I turns out that drawing "marching ant" lines is quite expensive, even in modern browsers; so I re-vamped the "waterfall" diagram from yesterday to cache frames. It means that the animation is a bit jittery for the first few seconds after landing on the web page, but quickly becomes very smooth.

Click here for the interactive versions.

2 comments :

  1. I like (the interactive version of) this one best. Thanks for this, it's not only cool, but useful :)

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  2. I agree. I think the animation was a very useful insight to indicate the 'direction' of the relationship. Who knew Haskell is that influential?!

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