ABSTRACT
ALREADY IN 1969, the proliferation of high-level programming languages was being compared to the Tower of Babel. 1 Since then, programming languages have continued to increase in number and complexity. A study of programming languages cannot hope to deal with all of these languages in detail, or even the most important of them. Instead, we will look at some of the themes and principles in their development and illustrate these with discussions of just a few languages.
