Our main goals are:

You should gain an understanding of programming languages principles by studying the programming languages paradigms from selected representatives from key language categories.

You should develop strategies for approaching learning a new programming language. With each next progr. lang., the learning gets a little easier. So that the learning is easier when you encounter another programming language, except when changing paradigms or key categories.

You should become familiar with imperative, string- and regex-based, object-oriented, functional, declarative, template-based paradigms that we'll cover.

You should learn how to read programming language manuals, and learn to navigate through the technical presation found in compact language definitions by learning the theoretical basis for these definitions. Specifically you will learn about lexical, keywords, regular expressions, syntaxgrammars, BNF, EBNF, syntax charts, semantic formalisms including axiomatic and other semantics systems, short and concise descriptions/meta descriptions, informal notations (by understanding how things - e.g. namespaces - work)

In 1972, there were 13 programming languages that experts considered "significant". As of 2006 that number has probably increased by an order of magnitude. In 2006, Bill Kennersley maintained and published an online catalog of approximately 2,500 programming languages. http://www.people.ku.edu/~nkinners/LangList/Extras/langlist.htm According to Jean Sammet, over 200 programming languages were developed between 1952 and 1972, but she considered only about 13 of them to be significant, which is 6.5%.^[2] By interpolation 6.5% of 2,500 is about 162 programming language. Learning 162 programming languages of these would take more than a lifetime.

So, which programming languages are useful to learn? Are there any lasting concepts that can be gained from studying some selected programming languages?