John Backus titled his 1977 Turing Award lecture to the ACM Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs. Section 1 is titled:
1. Conventional Programming Languages: Fat and Flabby
In the abstract, he states:
Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak: their primitive word-at-a-time style of programming inherited from their common ancestor--the von Neumann computer, their close coupling of semantics to state transitions
and later
For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity
doubling down on the body shaming and ableism. He clarifies later in the lecture that what he means by "von Neumann programming language" is one with assignment statements and manipulation of variables. Applicative (i.e. functional) languages are what he means to contrast with these stateful languages.

Several figures of that time, including Peter Landin of "the next 700 programming languages" fame, were unashamedly in love with the lambda calculus and the prospect that it could usher in a full algebraization of computer programming. Backus is interesting because here in a high-profile lecture he's explicitly referring to issues of state as making programming languages "fat" and "flabby". I suspect many of his peers felt similarly even if they weren't using such nakedly ableist metaphors.

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