Tier 3 — Family Index

Tier 3 — Family Index

• Type: language-family-index-of-indexes
• Total families: 85
• Total languages catalogued: ~2163 (across the family notes + cross-links into the 51 deep notes)
• Last updated: 2026-05-14 (expanded 13 → 20 → 24 → 28 → 32 → 33 → 37 → 41 → 45 → 49 → 53 → 57 → 61 → 65 → 69 → 73 → 77 → 81 → 85 families across eighteen passes; crossed 2000 in the seventeenth pass)

Purpose

Tier 3 is the encyclopedic / discovery layer of the Languages library. Where the 51 deep notes (Tier 1 + 2) and 6 cross-cutting comparison notes are designed for learning a language or deciding between languages, the Tier 3 family notes are designed for “what’s out there in this neighborhood?” lookups.

Each family note follows a tight schema: family overview → cross-links to deep notes → big tabular catalog → notable threads → citations. They’re indexes, not learning resources — read them when you need to know a language exists, not when you need to learn one deeply.

Families

How to query Tier 3

# Find a specific language by name
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs query "Carbon language Google" --hybrid --k 8
 
# Discover what's in a family
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs read --path "Languages/Tier3/scientific.md"
 
# List all family notes
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs list --path "Languages/Tier3"
 
# Find by use case across families
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs query "blockchain smart contract" --hybrid --k 8
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs query "embedded microcontroller" --hybrid --k 8
node ~/.claude/bin/obsidian-research.mjs query "verification formal methods" --hybrid --k 8

Coverage gaps and intentional omissions

Languages NOT catalogued (with rationale)

• Markup-only formats (HTML, XML, JSON, YAML on their own): not programming languages. Configuration overlays that use them as a substrate (Ansible YAML, Helm templates) are in config-and-dsl.
• Pure data formats (Parquet, Avro, Protocol Buffers schemas, FlatBuffers): schemas, not languages.
• Regex flavors: notation, not a language family worth a note. Reconsidered 2026-05-09 — now catalogued in regex-flavors (22 flavors).
• Per-game scripting languages (UnrealScript, Squirrel, AngelScript, Wren, Pawn, GDScript): now catalogued in game-scripting.
• Microsoft small / dead langs (J#, JScript.NET, Sing#, Bigloo Scheme): mostly in Lisps/ML/.NET-extras coverage; some intentionally skipped as historical curiosities.
• Database-internal procedural langs covered tangentially (PL/pgSQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL): documented inside the deep sql note rather than duplicated here.

Cross-family overlap

Some languages legitimately fit multiple families. Where this happened, the language appears in its primary family with a cross-reference:

• Mercury and Curry appear in both ml-and-fp and logic-and-constraint.
• Datalog appears in both query and logic-and-constraint.
• Mojo appears in both gpu-and-shaders and experimental-and-cross-host.
• PureScript / Elm appear in both ml-and-fp and experimental-and-cross-host.

Completed family extensions (2026-05-07)

The 7 originally-suggested extensions are now all written:

1. ✅ Game scripting — game-scripting (15 langs)
2. ✅ Embedded / firmware — embedded-firmware (17 langs)
3. ✅ Spreadsheet languages — spreadsheet (18 langs)
4. ✅ AI / agent / prompt languages — ai-prompt-languages (18 langs)
5. ✅ Notation / specification / verification — notation-spec (19 langs)
6. ✅ Music / audio synthesis — music-audio (18 langs)
7. ✅ Visual / dataflow — visual-dataflow (22 langs)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-09 — second pass)

The 4 originally-suggested-as-future extensions are now also written:

• ✅ Robotics / industrial control — robotics-control (~20)
• ✅ Document / typesetting — document-typesetting (~25)
• ✅ Smart-contract DSLs — smart-contract (~26)
• ✅ Build-time / DevOps DSLs — build-devops (~32)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-09 — third pass)

The 4 originally-suggested-as-further-future extensions are now also written:

• ✅ Graph / log / event / observability query — graph-log-event-query (~26)
• ✅ Bioinformatics & scientific workflow — bio-workflow (~22)
• ✅ HTTP / API / schema description — api-description (~28)
• ✅ Stream-processing DSLs — stream-processing (~22)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-09 — fourth pass)

The 4 originally-suggested-as-further-extended-still families are now also written:

• ✅ Theorem-prover DSLs — theorem-prover-dsls (~27)
• ✅ Regex flavors — regex-flavors (~22)
• ✅ Mathematical / proof notation — math-notation (~26)
• ✅ Game-engine scripting & level description — game-engine-scripting (~30)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-09 — fifth pass)

• ✅ Assembly & low-level encoding — assembly-and-encoding (~35 across ISA dialects + assemblers + binary/debug formats)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-09 — sixth pass)

• ✅ Constraint / SMT / SAT input languages — constraint-and-smt-input (~40 across SAT/QBF/proof + SMT + CSP/ASP/CP + MIP/LP + theorem-prover input)
• ✅ Educational exam pseudocode — exam-pseudocode (~19 across CIE/AQA/OCR/Edexcel/IB/AP CSP+CSA/SQA/NCEA/VCAA/NESA/WJEC/CSEC/CLRS/Knuth/Sedgewick)
• ✅ Codec / DSP / signal-processing — codec-and-dsp (~17 across DSP languages, filter-graph DSLs, codec-config languages, DSP-toolbox modelling)
• ✅ DWARF expressions & debug-info sub-DSLs — dwarf-expressions (~16 — split-out from assembly-and-encoding)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — seventh pass)

• ✅ Chatbot intent / NLU / voice-assistant DSLs — chatbot-intent-dsls (~22, including Rasa CALM/flows.yml, Dialogflow ES+CX, CLU, Alexa, AIML, ChatScript, RiveScript, VoiceXML, SCXML, OpenAI Realtime, etc.)
• ✅ Bibliographic citation & scholarly metadata — citation-formats (~24, including BibTeX/BibLaTeX, CSL XML+JSON, MARC 21, MODS, JATS, CrossRef, DataCite, CFF, OpenAlex, BIBFRAME)
• ✅ Bioinformatics & life-sciences file formats — bio-fileformats (~28 across sequence, structural, genomic-feature, chemistry, phylogenetics)
• ✅ Geo-spatial / GPS / cartography — geospatial (~31 across data formats, GPS protocols, OGC standards/services, styling/3D/AV)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — eighth pass)

• ✅ Industrial automation / OT protocols — industrial-automation (~26 across OPC UA, Sparkplug, fieldbus, IEC 61850, building automation, AAS)
• ✅ Configuration-management state DSLs — config-management (~25, including Puppet, OpenVox community fork, Ansible, Salt under Broadcom, NixOS, Talos, Pyinfra, Mgmt)
• ✅ i18n / localization / locale-data DSLs — i18n-locale (~24 across CLDR/MF2/Fluent/xcstrings/XLIFF/TMX)
• ✅ Calendar / scheduling / recurrence DSLs — calendar-scheduling (~25 across iCalendar/JSCalendar, RRULE, cron family, IANA tzdata, JMAP)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — ninth pass)

• ✅ Automotive / on-vehicle DSLs — automotive-onvehicle (~26 across CAN bus signal descriptions, AUTOSAR ARXML, OBD/UDS/DoIP diagnostics, SOME/IP, VSS/VISS)
• ✅ Print / page-description / printer-control — print-page-description (~28 across PostScript/PDF, PDF/X+A+UA subsets, PCL/AFP/IPDS, ZPL/ESC/POS specialty, JDF/IPP/ICC workflow)
• ✅ Music notation interchange & score-encoding — music-notation (~26 across MusicXML/MEI/MNX, LilyPond/SCORE/Verovio, ABC/ChordPro/GuitarPro folk+pop, Humdrum kern/Braille music academic)
• ✅ Accessibility / ARIA / conformance DSLs — accessibility-aria (~26 across WAI-ARIA, WCAG taxonomy, SSML/PLS speech, WebVTT/TTML/IMSC captions, UIA/NSAccessibility platform APIs, EPUB-A11Y/PDF/UA/DAISY documents)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — tenth pass)

• ✅ Identity / auth / authorization policy DSLs — identity-auth-policy (~28: SAML/OIDC/JWT/SCIM, AWS IAM/Cedar, OPA Rego v1, CEL, Kyverno, OpenFGA, SpiceDB, WebAuthn L3)
• ✅ Network protocol description & packet DSLs — network-protocol-dsls (~28: P4, NPL, Yang/NETCONF, Snort/Suricata, Wireshark/Kaitai, nftables, eBPF, TLS/QUIC/HTTP framing)
• ✅ Game-data / interactive-fiction / narrative — game-data-narrative (~26: Ink, Yarn Spinner 3.1, Twine + 4 story formats, Inform 7 v10.2, TADS, Ren’Py, ChoiceScript, Tracery, Articy:draft X)
• ✅ Business-process / workflow / EA modelling — process-modelling (~25: BPMN, DMN 1.6 beta, CMMN, UML/XMI, SysML v2 + KerML 1.0, ArchiMate 4, Camunda/Flowable engines, AWS Step Functions ASL, Argo Workflows, Temporal)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — eleventh pass — industry-vertical batch)

• ✅ Education / learning-content / e-Learning — learning-content (~27: SCORM, xAPI = IEEE 9274.1.1-2023, cmi5, LTI 1.3 + Advantage, QTI 3.0, OneRoster 1.2, Open Badges 3.0, CLR 2.0, CASE 1.1, H5P, Ed-Fi 5.2, CEDS, PESC)
• ✅ Healthcare / clinical / medical informatics — healthcare-clinical (~28: HL7 v2.9.1 + FHIR R5/R6 ballot, SMART on FHIR, CDA/C-CDA, DICOM 2026b, SNOMED CT monthly, ICD-11, LOINC, openEHR ADL 2 + AQL, OMOP CDM, CDISC SDTM/ADaM/ODM, CQL, FHIR Shorthand 3.0)
• ✅ Survey / questionnaire / experiment — survey-questionnaire (~24: REDCap, Qualtrics QSF, OpenClinica, ODK XForms + XLSForm, KoBoToolbox, SurveyJS, jsPsych 8.x, PsychoPy, OpenSesame, E-Prime, CDISC ODM v2.0)
• ✅ Financial / regulatory / insurance interchange — financial-regulatory (~30: FIX 5.0 SP2, SBE, ITCH/OUCH, FpML 5.13 + CDM 7, SWIFT MT-MX (cutover 2025-11-22), ISO 20022, FedNow, NACHA, EDIFACT, X12, ACORD GRLC G2, MISMO 3.6.2, XBRL + iXBRL, EBA/EIOPA DPM)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — twelfth pass — specialised vertical batch)

• ✅ Government / civic-tech / cyber-compliance — government-civictech (~30: Akoma Ntoso, OSCAL, STIX 2.1/TAXII, CSAF 2.0 = ISO/IEC 20153, CycloneDX 1.6 = ECMA-424, SPDX 3.0.1, MITRE ATT&CK v19, Sigma, DCAT, NIEMOpen, USLM)
• ✅ Cryptography / key-handling / secret-management — cryptography-keys (~32: OpenPGP RFC 9580 vs LibrePGP fork, PEM/DER/PKCS, X.509, sops 3.12.2, age, Vault HCL, KMIP 3.0, TUF 6.0, SLSA v1.1, Cosign v3.0, DSSE)
• ✅ Genealogy / family-history — genealogy (~20: GEDCOM 5.5.1 + 7.0.18 + 7.1 WD, GEDCOM-X, FHISO ELF + Citation Elements, Gramps 6.0.4, FTM, RootsMagic, MyHeritage, Ancestry, DNA file formats, pedigree numbering)
• ✅ Construction / Building-Information-Modelling — construction-bim (~27: IFC 4.3 = ISO 16739-1:2024 + IFC 5 alpha, STEP/EXPRESS, CIS/2, gbXML 8.01, COBie, BCF 3.0, IDS 1.0, mvdXML, bSDD, Brick 1.4.4, Haystack, ISO 19650 P6, EnergyPlus 25.2, Speckle)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — thirteenth pass — frontier vertical batch)

• ✅ Aerospace / defence / avionics / space-systems — aerospace-defence (~32: ARINC 429/664/653/661, MIL-STD-1553/1760/2525, Link 16 + 22, NITF, CCSDS Blue Books, FACE 3.2, SOSA Ed 2, MOSA, DDS 1.4, STEP AP242 Ed 3, JAUS, AIXM 5.2, FIXM 4.3, ASTERIX, AADL)
• ✅ NLP / corpus / linguistic annotation — nlp-corpus (~28: TEI P5 4.11, CoNLL-U + UD v2.17, PropBank/FrameNet/VerbNet, ELAN 7.1, Praat 6.4.64, BRAT/INCEpTION, NIF, spaCy DocBin, HuggingFace Datasets, Sketch Engine CQL, LMF)
• ✅ Retail / supply-chain / GS1 / commerce — retail-supplychain (~26: GS1 GenSpecs/GTIN/GLN/SSCC, EPCIS 2.0 = ISO/IEC 19987:2024, GS1 Digital Link 1.1.1, GDSN, UBL 2.4 = ISO/IEC 19845, EN 16931, Peppol BIS 3.0, Factur-X/ZUGFeRD, EDIFACT D.96A, ANSI X12/VICS, OAGIS 10.12, RosettaNet, Schema.org Product)
• ✅ Sport / athletics / fitness data — sport-fitness (~31: TCX, FIT SDK 21.202, GPX, Strava ext, PWX/ERG/MRC, ANT+/BLE GATT; Apple HealthKit + iOS 19 HKExportSession, Google Health Connect, Fitbit→Google Health rebrand 2026-05-19; StatsBomb/Hudl, Opta, NFL Next Gen, MLB Statcast, F1 ASN, ATP/WTA)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — fourteenth pass — heavy-niche batch)

• ✅ Forensic / digital-evidence / DFIR — forensic-evidence (~28: DFXML, plaso 20260119, AFF4, E01, CASE/UCO 1.0.0, Velociraptor 0.76.1 VQL, YARA-X 1.0.0, EDRM/Relativity DAT, KQL, EQL, OpenC2 v2.0)
• ✅ Statistical software & reproducible-research — statistical-software (~26: Stata 19 + Mata, SAS 9.4 M9 + macro/IML, IBM SPSS 32 (Francisco Partners 2024), Stan 2.38, JAGS, NIMBLE, PyMC v5.28.5, Turing.jl, Quarto 1.9.37, Jupyter)
• ✅ Insurance / risk / actuarial modelling — insurance-actuarial (~22: FIS Prophet, WTW RAFM, Moody’s AXIS, Milliman Integrate, Verisk Touchstone, Moody’s RMS Risk Modeler, KCC, Oasis LMF + OED, Solvency II QRT, IFRS 17, NAIC GOES)
• ✅ Tax-form / e-filing / structured-tax — tax-forms (~27: IRS MeF TY2025, IRIS, FIRE retiring 2026-12-31, TXF v042, OFX, OECD CRS v3.0, FATCA, CbCR, GIR Pillar Two, HMRC iXBRL + MTD, Mexico CFDI 4.0, Brazil SPED + NF-e + eSocial)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — fifteenth pass — final-niche batch)

• ✅ Real-estate / MLS / property data — real-estate-property (~26: RESO DD 2.0 + Web API, RETS legacy, MISMO/ULDD x-link, ALTA/TRID, OSCRE Smart Data Highway 2026, Trestle→Cotality, UK HM Land Registry)
• ✅ Maritime / shipping / port operations — maritime-port (~26: AIS, IMO FAL Maritime Single Window mandatory 2024, EDIFACT BAPLIE/COPRAR/COARRI/CODECO/MOVINS/VERMAS, DCSA T&T 3.0/Booking 2.0/eBL 3.0, IHO S-100 Phase 1 Jan 2026)
• ✅ Energy market / power-systems / smart-grid — energy-power (~30: IEC 61970-301 Ed 8 + 61968 + 62325, CGMES 3.0, PSS/E + PSCAD + PowerFactory + MATPOWER + PandaPower v3.4 + OpenDSS + GridLAB-D, OCPP 2.1 (V2X+DER, 2025-01-23), OCPI 2.3.0, ISO 15118 family, IEEE 2030.5-2023, OpenADR 3.1.0)
• ✅ Climate / sustainability / carbon-accounting — climate-carbon (~26: GHG Protocol, ISO 14064/14067/14068-1, GRI, ESRS XBRL Taxonomy, IFRS S1/S2 (mandatory Jan 2026 in Chile/Qatar/Mexico), TCFD wound down COP28, SBTi V2, VCS v5, EU Omnibus 2026/73)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — sixteenth pass — end-of-curve batch)

• ✅ ROS 2 / behavior-tree / robotics-config — ros2-robotics-config (~27: ROS 2 launch DSLs, BT.CPP 4.9, Groot 2 1.9, MoveIt SRDF, Nav2 BT XML, MCAP, PX4 v1.16, ArduPilot, MAVLink, micro-ROS, Zenoh)
• ✅ Patent / IP / standards-document — patent-ip-standards (~26: WIPO ST.96 v8.0, ST.26 biosequences (mandate 2022), USPTO/EPO/JPO/CNIPA/KIPO XML, IPC/CPC/NICE/Vienna/Locarno 2026 refresh, RFC XML v3, NISO STS 1.2)
• ✅ Voice / phonetics / pronunciation — voice-phonetics (~22: IPA + Unicode block, X-SAMPA, ARPAbet, CMUdict 0.7b, eSpeak NG 1.52, MFA 3.3.9, MaryTTS (frozen), Festival, Soundex/Metaphone)
• ✅ OCI / container-runtime / cloud-native — oci-cloud-native (~28: OCI Image v1.1 + Runtime v1.2 + Distribution v1.1 (2024 triple-bump), CRI/CNI/CSI/CDI, Helm + Kustomize + KCL + CUE 0.14, Cilium Tetragon, CloudEvents (CNCF Graduated 2024), Argo CD + FluxCD)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-10 — seventeenth pass — post-saturation batch)

• ✅ Astronomy / space-data / astrophysics — astronomy-space (~27: FITS 4.0, IVOA stack TAP 1.1 + ADQL 2.1 + VOTable 1.5, VOEvent → GCN/Kafka, SPICE, PDS4 1.25, ASDF 1.6)
• ✅ Agriculture / precision-farming — agriculture-farming (~22: ISOBUS/ISO 11783 + ISOXML, ADAPT Standard 1.0 (June 2024), AgGateway Modus v2 (2025), SPADE/PAIL, John Deere Ops Center, Climate FieldView, Trimble Ag, AGCO Fuse, AEF, Crop Ontology)
• ✅ Legal contract / smart-clause / law-as-code — legal-contract (~22: Accord Concerto + Ergo (deprecated Q1 2026), OpenLaw markup, Catala v0.10 + DGFiP APL deployment, OpenFisca in 13 countries, ODRL 2.2 CG, HotDocs, Symboleo, Aragon BORGs)
• ✅ Semantic web / RDF / linked-data — semantic-web (~30: RDF 1.2 CR + 1.1, Turtle 1.2, JSON-LD 1.1, OWL 2 + Profiles, SHACL 1.0 + 1.2 FPWDs, ShEx 2.1, R2RML + RML 1.0 + YARRRML, SPARQL 1.1 + 1.2 WD, GeoSPARQL 1.1, Schema.org v30, Solid Protocol v0.12)

Completed family extensions (2026-05-14 — eighteenth pass — final saturation batch)

• ✅ GenAI / LLM-runtime / model-serving — genai-llm-runtime (~30: HF transformers/tokenizer/generation config, GGUF v3 + Dynamic GGUF 2.0, safetensors, ONNX opset 27, vLLM 0.6+, TGI (maintenance mode Dec 2025), MLX 0.21, PEFT adapter_config, GPTQ/AWQ/EXL2, OpenAI Structured Outputs Aug 2024, Anthropic Structured Outputs public beta Nov 2025)
• ✅ Cybersecurity deep-tier — cybersec-deep (~32: eBPF KRSI + Tetragon + bpftrace + bcc, Falco v0.43.1, AppArmor/SELinux/Landlock/seccomp, AWS GuardDuty/Security Hub/Inspector/Macie/Detective filters, Azure Resource Graph KQL, Sentinel + Defender XDR, Wiz, Lacework→FortiCNAPP, Datadog CSPM/DQL, CrowdStrike FQL/LogScale, CodeQL 2.25, Semgrep Multimodal, Trivy v0.70, HashiCorp Sentinel, OPA Conftest, Sigstore Cosign verification policy)
• ✅ 3D / AR / VR scene description — 3d-scene (~33: OpenUSD 26.05 + USDA/USDC/USDZ + Composition Arcs + Hydra + Reality Composer Pro, glTF 2.0 + KHR_materials_* + KHR_gaussian_splatting RC Feb 2026, MaterialX 1.39.4, KTX 2.0 + Basis Universal, OCIO 2.4 + OpenEXR 3.3.8 + OpenSubdiv + OpenVDB + Alembic 1.8.8, OBJ/FBX/Collada/X3D 4.0/VRML/PLY/STL, WebXR + OpenXR 1.1, NeRF + 3DGS .splat/SPZ/KSPLAT)
• ✅ Linguistic-resource publishing / lexicon — linguistic-resources (~28: OntoLex-Lemon core + lexicog + FrAC + 6 modules, Wikibase Lexemes since 2018, DBnary twice-monthly RDF dumps, LMF ISO 24613 parts 1-6 modular split complete, TEI Lex-0 Jul 2025, TEI Guidelines 4.10.0, LIFT 0.13, WN-LMF 1.4, TBX ISO 30042 v3, CIDOC CRM = ISO 21127:2023, ISO 639-1/2/3/5 + BCP 47, Glottolog 5.3, CLDF 1.3, JMdict/EDICT/KANJIDIC)

Library is functionally complete

At 85 families / ~2163 catalogued languages, the library covers every meaningful DSL niche we’ve been able to identify. Further expansion would require splitting existing families (e.g., separating SHACL from semantic-web, or DDS from aerospace-defence) rather than adding genuinely new ground. The next scheduled maintenance event is the six-month deep-note version refresh in ~2026-11 against the 51 Tier 1+2 deep notes.

Citations

• Wikipedia: Lists of programming languages — entry-point catalog, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_programming_languages
• GitHub Linguist repository — language detection and ranking, https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist
• TIOBE Index — popularity ranking, https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
• Esolangs Wiki — for esoteric grounding, https://esolangs.org/
• Hacker News “Show HN: my new language” archives — for tracking experimental experimental-and-cross-host entries.
• The 13 family notes themselves are the primary indexes; per-language URLs are in their tables.