There is a full book (900+ pages) written by the same author on more or less the same subject: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.102.7366&rep=rep1&type=pdf. It seems to be a very good answer to the OP. But, yes, rather hard stuff.

Great expectatations. From ibidem:

"One approach to study computer programming is to study programming languages. But there are a tremendously large number of languages, so large that it is impractical to study them all. How can we tackle this immensity? We could pick a small number of languages that are representative of different programming paradigms. But this gives little insight into programming as a unified discipline."

"This book uses another approach. We focus on programming concepts and the techniques to use them, not on programming languages. The concepts are organized in terms of computation models. A computation model is a formal system that defines how computations are done. There are many ways to define computation models. Since this book is intended to be practical, it is important that the computation model should be directly useful to the programmer. We will therefore define it in terms of concepts that are important to programmers: data types, operations, and a programming language. The term computation model makes precise the imprecise notion of “programming paradigm”. The rest of the book talks about computation models and not programming paradigms. Sometimes we will use the phrase programming model. This refers to what the programmer needs: the programming techniques and design principles made possible by the computation model."

See also: Seif Haridi

Best regards, Karl

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

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Thank you Karl for link to a very nice book with excerpt. It must be a very good reading. One question though. This book is written in 2003. Assume that you have explored this book, do you think that there is anything missing in the book after 15 years which can possibly explain the myriad flow of software that has been developed ?