I've noticed that people only speak well of COBOL when Grace Murray Hopper's name occurs nearby.
I suspect that this says something about COBOL.
I suspect that this says something about COBOL.
When judged by standards of the day COBOL wasn’t bad. It was one of the first examples of a high-level language. People’s experiences with it (and large undocumented spaghetti logic programs) helped inform the next generation of languages.
Later our (ongoing) experiences with the unsafety of C led to Java, C#, and D among others. Further reactions to those are Swift and Rust.
I’d argue we wouldn’t have any of those languages in the same form without COBOL.
Compared to LISP?
You can't compare the languages like that, they were created to fill very different roles, and both were very successful at what they did.
Cobol was first (or close to it) so it had to discover what “wrong” meant in the context of programming languages.
They had no way of knowing back then that having a programming language for non-programmers is a hard problem, close to impossible. Same goes for the natural language bit.
With the benefit of hindisght, yeah, we can make fun of it. It doesn’t make us right, though.
>They had no way of knowing back then that having a programming language for non-programmers is a hard problem, close to impossible
They had a very easy way of knowing this. Ask an actual non-programmer to write code. And do this during the design process.
>Cobol was first (or close to it) so it had to discover what “wrong” meant in the context of programming languages.
They had to discover that ignoring all of the existing computer science literature on language design would lead to poor language design? And that employing an untalented design team would lead to a poor spec? Sorry, but I don't buy it. I certainly don't see some grand lesson that anybody learned from it that we didn't already learn from the previous hundred years of research and design.