'Can Programming Be Liberated from the von. Neumann Style?' by John Backus is another great work very worth studying: 'Conventional programming languages are g

'Can Programming Be Liberated from the von. Neumann Style?' by John Backus is another great work very worth studying: 'Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak: their primitive word-at-a-time style of programming inherited from their common ancestor—the von Neumann computer, their close coupling of semantics to state transitions, their division of programming into a world of expressions and a world of statements, their inability to effectively use powerful combining forms for building new programs from existing ones, and their lack of useful mathematical properties for reasoning about programs.' Thankfully, 30+ years later these problems are widely fixed ;) http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_l...