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Dijkstra advertia, no seu livro A Discipline of Programming:

Historically speaking, this last aspect, viz. the fact that programming languages could be used as a vehicle for instructing existing automatic computers, has for a long time been regarded as their most important property. The efficiency with which existing automatic computers could execute programs written in a certain language became the major quality criterion for that language ! As a regrettable result, it is not unusual to find anomalies in existing machines truthfully reflected in programming languages, this at the expense of the intellectual manageability of the programs expressed in such a language (as if programming without such anomalies was not already difficult enough!).