The original McCarthy LISP started even more abstract than ML: it was intended as a logical thought exercise, and was only accidentally a programming language a

The original McCarthy LISP started even more abstract than ML: it was intended as a logical thought exercise, and was only accidentally a programming language at all. COBOL (and Ada) were standards-first languages. The industry-driven standards committees designed the languages first, and it was not until afterwards that there were working implementations, much less working programs. Industry experience guided them in later releases, but v1.0 (which Rust is still working towards) were even more ivory-tower than languages whose only program is their own compiler.