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If you leave the HN/SV bubble, you find huge amounts of Fortran. It's still plays a significant role in scientific computing. If you lost track of it in the '80s, you might be interested that the language had major updates in '90, '95, '03, '08 and 2018. It's just not a part of the world of cat pix sharing websites and innumerable "Foo of Bar" startups.

Same with COBOL.

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One thing I credit COBOL with is the use of descriptive variable naming. In FORTRAN you see variables named i, j, x etc (just look at Numerical Recipes) but in COBOL you see TOTAL_MONTH_SALES and the like. It is considered good style and “self-documenting” to do that today.

COBOL was intended from the start to be "self-documenting" and English-like with the thinking being that it could be used by 'non-programmers' to create business logic. Not sure that I buy it achieved that goal, but it was the intent.

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