A Taxonomy of Programming Languages for Code Generation
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866913012723482624 |
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| author | Raihan, Nishat Newman, Christian Zampieri, Marcos |
| author_facet | Raihan, Nishat Newman, Christian Zampieri, Marcos |
| contents | The world's 7,000+ languages vary widely in the availability of resources for NLP, motivating efforts to systematically categorize them by their degree of resourcefulness (Joshi et al., 2020). A similar disparity exists among programming languages (PLs); however, no resource-tier taxonomy has been established for code. As large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly capable of generating code, such a taxonomy becomes essential. To fill this gap, we present the first reproducible PL 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 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 LLMs. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00239 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Taxonomy of Programming Languages for Code Generation Raihan, Nishat Newman, Christian Zampieri, Marcos Computation and Language The world's 7,000+ languages vary widely in the availability of resources for NLP, motivating efforts to systematically categorize them by their degree of resourcefulness (Joshi et al., 2020). A similar disparity exists among programming languages (PLs); however, no resource-tier taxonomy has been established for code. As large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly capable of generating code, such a taxonomy becomes essential. To fill this gap, we present the first reproducible PL 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 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 LLMs. |
| title | A Taxonomy of Programming Languages for Code Generation |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00239 |