 I think conventional languages are for the birds. They're just extensions of the von Neumann computer, and they keep our noses in the dirt of dealing with individual words and computing addresses, and doing all kinds of silly things like that, things that we've picked up from programming for computers; we've built them into programming languages; we've built them into Fortran; we've built them in PL/1; we've built them into almost every language. (John Backus)
