General purpose languages should be metalanguages
Jeremy G. Siek · 2010
In his paper, The Next 700 Programming Languages, the late Landin writes that "most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things." Landin tries to separate the general purpose aspects of a language from the problem specific aspects. Instead of hundreds of languages with ad-hoc differences, Landin proposes one general-purpose language with many different sets of primitive operations for different problem domains.