The document discusses the history of programming languages like FORTRAN, COBL, LISP, and others. It notes that FORTRAN was created in 1954 and was one of the earliest languages. It also mentions newer languages like Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby for high performance computing and compares them to earlier languages like COBOL, LISP, C, and C++. The document references the evolution of languages influenced by Simula and Smalltalk through Ruby and compares approaches like functional programming in StandardML, OCaml, Haskell, Prolog, and Erlang.