[sklogic]

A way from your formal specification of a solution down to a particular language set of features can be enormously long.

A trivial example can be translating a formal grammar - codified as just few lines of BNF - into a low level language (say, C, or Java). Good if your grammar can be expressed as recursive descent directly, and even in this case you'll end up spitting out hundreds of lines of code, most likely making a lot stupid mistakes.

So, language does matter a lot. BNF is a right language for this task. C or Java are not right, period. Programmers should not waste their precious time translating abstract concepts down to the boring languages minutiae - they must always use the same level of abstraction as their problem domain requires.