

The Next 700 Programming Languages (1965) [pdf] - gnosis
http://www.thecorememory.com/Next_700.pdf

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silentbicycle
The HOPL books & papers are great, too. Most (if not all) should be available
on citeseer / google scholar. I have the HOPL II book and trivially found all
the papers from HOPL III online.

I particularly like the history papers for Lisp, Lua, Erlang, and Forth, but,
personal biases.

Another good one: Sammet's _Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals_.
(The superior design of Lisp and APL gets asymptotically more embarrassing in
retrospect.)

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jvoorhis
I get the impression Peter Landin was ahead of his time. I love this paper.
It's worth a read by anyone interested in compilers or functional programming.

