Why the focus on language? Programming languages abstract some programming ideas and provide a framework for expressing them easily, but the ideas and abstract

Why the focus on language? Programming languages abstract some programming ideas and provide a framework for expressing them easily, but the ideas and abstractions that are used to construct programs are independent of the programming language. I am reminded of a quote from Michael Griffiths (I think from one of the 1962 Software Engineering Conferences) to the effect that he always used the same programming language [that is, programming elements] no matter what the compiler.