Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

According to OrangeFish  <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid>:

On 2024-08-16 10:14, John Levine wrote (in part):

For some kinds of work, COBOL is still an entirely reasonable language, albeit
one where the learning curve can be pretty steep.

>
An interesting comment on the learning curve (and I know nothing about
COBOL) given the story that the language was created to allow
non-programmers to programme.

At the time, the alternative was writing progams in octal or decimal machine language, or
if you were lucky, a simple assembler.

I believe it was never true that COBOL's English-like was intended to let non-programmers
write programs. The idea was to make it easier for them to read the programs so they could
do things like compare what the program did to whatever the previous system did, probably
involving card sorters and plugboards and manual adding machines.

--
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