This is kind of nonsensical.

Ruby and PHP are direct descendants of Perl (which is still going). Ruby merged Perl with Smalltalk, roughly, and PHP merged Perl with a box of hammers (nevermind that not all problems involve nails), while removing a number of "hard" features in Perl, like first-class functions and closures.

Python is not on the C++/Java timeline, either, coming from ABC and others.

JavaScript is a descendant of Scheme (with C-like syntax).

Scala/Lift is not popular enough to really deserve mention among the rest of this bunch of languages, all the rest of which have been extraordinarily popular and used by millions of programmers.

I explained what I thought the OP was here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1749696

I interpreted the OP as trying to portray the progression of the "popular framework." I mean, the original Ask HN question was about what they see a lot of people choosing. I didn't like how this chart was portraying it as Ruby vs. Python.

My point is that it used to be PHP, Perl or Java and I think a lot of Java people have moved into Ruby, Python, Scala, etc... Meanwhile, there are still tons of people using PHP (unlike the OP's portrayal that that has stopped somehow). The question marks is to indicate that I don't know what's happened with Perl. I don't know if people still use it for web programming or not.

I totally get how it could be hard to read. What is interesting is that it got voted up until you called it nonsensical and then it got voted down to 1 again. That means some people got it and agreed and some people didn't (which is totally understandable).

I think yours confused people because you left out the box of hammers. It's important for clarity.

I read this as the progression of the poster's use of languages and not a table of heritage.

How does the Perl "???" fit into that theory? Wouldn't the poster know whether he's still using Perl or not?

I think he means that he has no idea what former perl users have converted to using.

Most of them would have moved onto Perl web frameworks. Rough timeline would be:

    Perl --> cgi
         \--> mod_perl
          \--> Mason
           \--> CGI::Application
            \--> Maypole --> Catalyst
                         \--> Jifty
                          \--> Mojolicious
                           \--> Dancer
                            \--> Squatting
                  \--> Continuity         
                   \--> PSGI / Plack [works with all the above]

I've used Perl off and on since 97. If that were similar to him how would you display it in the text chart? And it's not meant to be a snarky reply.