
The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution [pdf] - Jach
https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf
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AnimalMuppet
Interesting.

TL;DR: We can thing of programming languages as "languages" or as "systems". A
"system" is a mechanism for making things happen; a "language" is a formal
grammar with defined meaning. Around 1990, we shifted from an even mix of
thinking of "systems" and "languages", to an environment where "language"
dominated the thinking.

My take: This fits into something that I've been thinking recently, that there
is a split between computer science and software engineering. Computer
scientists think about the formal properties of languages; software engineers
_use_ languages to try to do something else. I think that those two ways of
viewing programming languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant to each
other.

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godelmachine
I agree with your TL;DR

