A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… programs were once built and maintained via assembly. This is not the case today; assembler as a language has been reduced (more or less) to a state of obsolescence.

In the Star Wars universe, Luke Skywalker is able to communicate with his personal astromech droid, R2D2. How Skywalker is able to understand the beeps and whines that R2D2 emits is something of a mystery; the respective manners in which both R2D2 and Skywalker communicate is analogous to the ways in which lower and higher level languages are designed. R2D2 speaks via whirrs and beeps whereas Skywalker exhibits general fluency in Galactic Basic.

By improving upon the level of abstraction, program complexity is more easily concealed. Thus, the modern progression of the programming language is expected to tend toward greater readability.