The key to Europe’s vigor may have been the fact that it was divided up into a number of small, competing states. These were close enough that ideas could travel from one to the other, but independent enough that no one ruler could put a lid on innovation — as the Chinese court disastrously did when they forbade the development of large ocean-going ships. So it is probably all to the good that programmers live in a post-Babel world. If we were all using the same language, it would probably be the wrong one.
