There's a special level of Hell that involves streaming xml processing and cobol. Since cobol lacks dynamic memory allocation (speaking of cobol 85 here) and you don't generally build things like linked lists or trees, there's a limited number of things you can conveniently do with streaming xml data. Many cobol programmers are left with a feeling of despair, I wager.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is certainly real in programming languages[1].

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox