Philosophical debate on language leads to question

I heard Grace Hopper talk about the origins of COBOL. She said they first "turned it in" in several languages, but it was rejected for being "too ambitious" or something like that.

C only has about 35 keywords, several of which aren't words ("int"), and others of which are deprecated ("register")
It wouldn't take much to translate the whole thing.

And then there's APL...