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Comment by 22289d | Hacker News Reader

> But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

lol

I don't know anything about COBOL but I can feel all of the people that must have triggered. Which is surely why the author included it. Probably like if today that said PHP or Lisp.

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COBOL is just a different "styled" language than the Algol family of languages. It is fashionable to dunk on it because of its english-like verbosity which is quite alien to Programmers who initially came from a mathematical background and hence were used to succinct notation. You just have to get used to it. My first job (decades ago on a mainframe) was in COBOL-85 and i found it fine particularly in its strong File handling capabilities which i used to build a simple RDBMS-like system.

You might want to peruse the wikipedia article just to see what it offers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

Not Lisp, no. COBOL was like picking your nose with boxing gloves on (h/t Michael Pavlinch). It was appallingly clumsy to use. Lisp was like programming directly in the compiler's abstract syntax tree, with both the plusses and the minuses of that. It was almost the opposite extreme from COBOL.

Or to put it a different way: I don't program in Lisp because that language isn't a good fit for how my brain works and the kind of problems I work on. I don't program in COBOL because I don't like reading things that take that long to come to the point.

They're not wrong. I actually tried learning COBOL at some point and it really is pretty bad. On the other hand, ALGOL turned out to be a surprisingly elegant language and I certainly understand how it influenced pretty much everything that we use today. I actually wish C had more of ALGOL in it.

Lisps were never on the same tier as COBOL or PHP.

And those who wrote in Assembly would dunk on those C programmers. And those who wrote in binary would dunk on the Assembly devs. And those that only had 0's would dunk on those binary devs.

“Pfft” - Ada Lovelace & Joseph Marie Jacquard

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