Your points are well taken. But the more likely explanation for the professor's reaction was just that doing anything in programming language design would be "

Your points are well taken. But the more likely explanation for the professor's reaction was just that doing anything in programming language design would be "academic suicide". The date of his remark was about 1974, and I was suggesting improvements in PL/I that I'd been using for about 4 years. I believe his view was that academic research for programming languages in practice was over with -- e.g., LISP, APL, Algol 68, and PL/I were all implemented by 1974. So, your examples show that he was wrong: Long after 1974 others in academics did work in programming languages without academic death via suicide or otherwise. Sooo, in 1974, views of the academic research content of programming language design varied -- such variations are with us frequently, i.e., make horse races. But that encounter in 1974 was just one example. I had another one from a computer science professor in the 1990s. Also, with some irony, in the 1980s and 1990s, I was in the group at IBM's Watson lab that designed and implemented the artificial intelligence rule-based language YES/L1. We published lots of papers in academic conferences. Moreover, beyond just design, I was our lead on joint work with GM Research and was one of our two presenters of our paper at the AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) IAAI (Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence) at Stanford; so the work, design, implementation, and application of YES/L1 was regarded as worth of publication in academics. Indeed, MIT published a book with paper from the conference, and our paper was one of the ones published. So, with my work, I, too, showed that the comments of those two professors I mentioned were not correct. Still, it remains, with my two examples from professors, there long has been an attitude and belief that work in programming languages is not sufficiently "fundamental" to be in computer science and would be "academic suicide". That has been a common attitude; now both of us have shown that the attitude was not correct, but it remains that that attitude has long existed -- that was my claim, that there was such an attitude. I didn't claim that the attitude was universal or correct. Given that the attitude has been in academic computer