Programming Language Hierarchy
There are supposedly generations of languages. According to Wikipedia:

First generation: Machine language.

Second generation: Low-level programming languages such as assembly language.

Third generation: Structured high-level programming languages such as C, COBOL and FORTRAN.

Fourth generation: Domain-specific high-level programming languages such as SQL (for database access) and TeX (for text formatting)

The fifth generation was supposed to be developed by Japan's fifth generation project in the 1980s but didn't really go anywhere. Some people consider constraint-based languages to be fifth generation (Wikipedia).

There is also a supposed hierarchy of language power, expressed by Paul Graham as the "Blub Paradox" in his essay Beating the Averages. In this controversial approach, languages such as Basic and Cobol are low in the hierarchy, Python and Perl would be in the middle, and Lisp would be at the top.