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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2024 17:02:14 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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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.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly