It's really interesting that Haskell, which is often portrayed as merely an academic play-thing, is so prominent. By bringing together so many language features that were otherwise relatively obscure it's acted as a kind of language laboratory — and in doing so it's made a really clear case for a lot of them.
It's a language designer's language--just like jazz is often musician's music :).
Haskell serves as both a vessel and a showcase for PL research. It also has very close ties to a bunch of communities, including many of the people behind Microsoft's languages (VB.NET, C# and F#).
Also, while Haskell does not have a broad presence in industry, it does have a reasonable amount of mindshare. A surprising number of people know and talk about Haskell, even if they've never used it. This also helps influence the design of other languages.
I know I like to talk about Haskell, even if it's too dense for me to grasp at a level where I could put it into production without jumping off a bridge.
Not to mention that it's just repeating whatever myths Wikipedia has picked up, like the connection of Javascript to Scheme. A more rigorously curated graph would be very interesting.
I thought that AppleScript looked oddly placed, sheltering directly under Lisp. But some people do consider it to be influenced by Lisp/Scheme - Matt Neuburg proposes the connection somewhere in his 'AppleScript - the definitive guide'. I would have connected it more with HyperTalk, which is down past ECMAscript. And English.
> AppleScript was officially conceived in 1989 as a research project by the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) at Apple Computer and was code-named “Family Farm.” The research team was led by Larry Tesler and included Mike Farr, Mitchell Gass, Mike Gough, Jed Harris, Al Hoffman, Ruben Kleiman, Edmund Lai, and Frank Ludolph.
Some of those knew Lisp. The Advanced Technology Group led by Tesler used Macintosh Common Lisp in many application prototypes and research projects. There was an 'AppleScript on Steroids' written in MCL called Sk8Script by them.
That was my first thought as well. I wish I could click on a single language and have it highlight only its direct connections or darken everything else.
