Christian Newman
Author directory2026
A Taxonomy of Programming Languages for Code Generation
Nishat Raihan | Christian Newman | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
Nishat Raihan | Christian Newman | Marcos Zampieri
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
The world’s 7,000+ languages vary widely in the availability of resources for natural language processing, motivating efforts to systematically categorize them by their degree of resourcefulness. A similar disparity exists among programming languages; however, no resource-tier taxonomy has been established for code. As large language models grow increasingly capable of generating code, such a taxonomy becomes essential. To fill this gap, we present the first reproducible programming-language resource classification, grouping 646 languages into four tiers. We show that only 1.9% of languages (Tier 3, High) account for 74.6% of all tokens in seven major web-derived corpora, while 71.7% of languages (Tier 0, Scarce) contribute just 1.0%. Statistical analyses of within-tier inequality, dispersion, and distributional skew confirm that this imbalance is both extreme and systematic. Our results provide a principled framework for dataset curation and tier-aware evaluation of multilingual large language models, as well as the first quantitative picture of code availability on the web.