Arjun Guha, Shriram Krishnamurthi. Minding the (semantic) gap: engineering programming language theory. In Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research. FoSER '10, pages 155-156, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010. [doi]
Like programs, programming languages are not only mathematical objects but also software engineering artifacts. Describing the semantics of real-world languages can help bring language theory to bear on both exciting and important realworld problems. Achieving this is not purely a mathematical task, but equally one of (semantic) engineering.