Why are Pokemon types listed in the order that they are?

Question

There are three orders I see types listed in:

• The way official manuals and guides list them, as well as many (most?) fan works: normal, fire, water, electric, etc
• The way Bulbapedia and some other fan works list them: normal, fighting, flying, poison, etc
• Alphabetically

Alphabetically speaks for itself. The Bulbapedia order is all of the types that were physical and then all of the types that were special, but the order within those two groups seems arbitrary. The official order seems to have no rhyme or reason.

Comments

This question has already been asked. http://pokemondb.net/pokebase/242465/does-the-order-of-types-have-an-effect-on-a-pokemon

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sumwun, you don't appear to have read the question or you have linked to the wrong place.

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This is fine. Link asks /does/ it affect the Pokemon, this asks /why/ they're like that in the first place.

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Sorry. I didn't read the question carefully.

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By the way, I'm guessing that's the order the types were added to the game.
I also want you to know that the second order is used by the search function on Pokedexes in Generation 4.

Answer 1

The order works so that each type is weak to the type that follows it, with a clear and justified exception to the three types at the end, which were added after the conception of the other types. But even despite these exceptions, there is not a perfect flow, which is demonstrated below:

Normal sits by itself.
Fire comes after, which is weak to Water, which is weak to Electric.
Then comes Grass, which is weak to Ice, which is weak to Fighting.
Then comes Poison, which is weak to Ground, which isn't really weak to but I guess it cohesively precedes Flying.
Then comes Psychic, which is weak Bug, which is weak to Rock.
Finally, the types Ghost and Dragon which are weak to themselves.
Dark and Steel were added in Gen II and Fairy was added in Gen VI.

It isn't a perfect order so if anyone has a better justification then I'll happily hide this answer, but I like to believe this is as good as it gets.

Hope I helped. :)
For reference: the type order being discussed

Comments

electric is not weak to grass but grass resists electric
ground is not weak to flying but flying is immune to ground

fighting and poison and flying and psychic don't really have any relation though

EDIT: Here's an order

NORMAL
FIRE weak to WATER weak to ELECTRIC resisted by GRASS weak to ICE weak to FIGHTING weak to PSYCHIC weak to BUG resisted by POISON resisted by ROCK weak to GROUND unaffected on FLYING

GHOST
DRAGON
DARK
STEEL
FAIRY

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The way I've always memorized the types was the order that I usually followed to beat Pokemon Conquest's map, if anyone here has ever played that, and then adding Fairy once gen VI came around. That being said, the way the map works isnt even possible to follow using Serebii's list lol.
My best guess would be that it's just random, based logically on whatever came first to the original person writing the manuals. Order that they were created some plausible, but that'd be extremely hard to prove, even with access to the original Red and Green code.