Leslie Lamport said, > Computer scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian syndrome1—the confusion of language with reality. [1] And, on com

Leslie Lamport said, > Computer scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian syndrome1—the confusion of language with reality. [1] And, on comparing languages [2] (paraphrased from "specifying" to "programming"): > Comparisons between radically different formalisms tend to cause a great deal of confusion. Proponents of formalism A often claim that formalism B is inadequate because concepts that are fundamental to [programs] written with A cannot be expressed with B. Such arguments are misleading. The purpose of a formalism is not to express [programs] written in another formalism, but to [program] some aspects of some class of computer systems. [Programs] of the same system written with two different formalisms are likely to be formally incomparable… Arguments that compare formalisms directly, without considering how those formalisms are used to [program] actual systems, are useless. [1]: http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/deroever-festschrift.pdf http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/deroever-festschrift.p... [2]: http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-verification.pdf http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-verification.p...