Strachey's lectures on "Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages" provided an extremely broad survey of core issues in programming language design that provided much of the terminology we use today, including definitions of the kinds of polymorphism and the kinds of expressions we see in programming languages. Published as a paper many years later, Strachey's lectures provide an especially readable overview of programming languages concepts.
Bio
John Myles White (@johnmyleswhite (https://twitter.com/johnmyleswhite)) is a Julia hacker who loves thinking about the ways in which the design of technical programming languages influences the way in which we think about statistics and machine learning. He's written two books about machine learning for O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/4730) and works at Facebook.
