Competitors punch you in the jaw, but investors have you by the balls. - Paul Graham

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

You can’t trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they’re satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.