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." John Backus, known for Fortran, Algol and BNF