One of the design goals for COBOL was that non programmers should be able to understand it with a little training. That would allow non technical managers to ha

One of the design goals for COBOL was that non programmers should be able to understand it with a little training. That would allow non technical managers to have a bit more control over their projects than they would have with Fortran, Algol or PL/1. I don't know how well that worked out, but other than Hypercard all other languages I am familiar with (and they are many) only make sense to those who can program in them. So though Java is often considered to be the modern COBOL, at least in this regard it isn't.