Excerpt from an overview of a provocative programming reality check
Meanwhile, the languages designed by academics who are obsessed with internal consistency and correctness include a bunch of mostly dead tongues: Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, C and Smalltalk. The only exceptions are .NET and Java, which were the products of considerable investment by Microsoft and Sun.
In light of this history, as well as her own experience in academia, Lopes argues that the reason the ivory tower is no longer creating programming languages that people actually use is that it treats programming as a science, when really, it's more of a design discipline.
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages - Technology Review
