"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its excitement. Instead, it is now the province of those who prefer to work with thick compendia of details rather than wrestle with new ideas. Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests between fundamentally differing concepts."
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Original Language: English
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John Backus, "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?", 1977 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 21 (8), (August 1978): p. 614
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Programming_languages
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Programming languages
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