The major issues of modern software are its size and complexity, and its major problems involve finding effective techniques and tools for organization and maintenance. This paper traces the important ideas of modern programming languages to their roots in the problems and languages of the past decade and shows how these modern languages respond to contemporary problems in software development. Modern programming's key concept for controlling complexity is abstraction--that is, selective emphasis on detail; new developments in programming languages provide ways to support and exploit abstraction techniques. (kr)
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