a temple tower of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories
In his blog entry about creating the JavaScript programming language, Brendan Eich writes: “The answer was that two languages were required to serve the two mostly-disjoint audiences in the programming ziggurat who most deserved dedicated programming languages: the component authors, who wrote in C++ or (we hoped) Java; and the ‘scripters,’ amateur or pro, who would write code directly embedded in HTML.” I don’t recall having seen this word used figuratively before, but that is obviously what Mr. Eich is dong here.