The Ontogeny-Recapitulates-Phylogeny Principle of Language Instruction

The ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny principle of language instruction is something I first came across while reading about collections in Practical Common Lisp here. According to this, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I.e., an organism, in the course of its development, goes through the same successive stages (in abbreviated form) as did the species in its evolutionary development. When applied to programming language theory, this theory suggests that the process of learning a programming language follows a similar path to the historical development of that language.