Programmer Migration Patterns

If we start at the top, you can see four main branches, corresponding to specializations where people seem to get into programming:

Anyway, let’s go back to the 1990s, and pretend that the world was simple, and (1) low level programmers used C or asm or Turbo Pascal, (2) business programmers used VB, (3) Numerical programmers used Fortran or R or MATLAB, and (4) Glue programmers used sh or perl. Oddly enough, once people got started in C, they started using it for all kinds of stuff: it was one of the few languages where you could, whether or not it was a good idea, legitimately implement all four categories of programming problem. Let’s look next at the Visual Basic and Pascal branches, because there’s a weird alternate reality that you either find obviously right (“Why would I ever use something as painful as C or Java?”)

Source: apenwarr.ca