4 ms·

It's useful to review what the computing landscape looked like back then. The choice of language was either fortran, cobol, or assembler. And if you were automa

It's useful to review what the computing landscape looked like back then. The choice of language was either fortran, cobol, or assembler. And if you were automating business processes, your programs were reading fixed length lines of data off a tape. So compared to assembler, cobol was a dream. Sure it was a dead end, and its creators seemed to lack the insight and sophistication of the Algol creators, but no one ever claimed it to be a general purpose language, and it did its job well. Sure it's fun to bloviate, denigrate, and opine, in ignorance, but there are good reasons why it was widely used for so long, and why there are billions of loc still in production.

greenyoda 9y ago
"your programs were reading fixed length lines of data off a tape" COBOL could actually do more sophisticated stuff than that. For example, it had the "occurs depending on" construct, where you could read a record that had variable numbers of repetitions of a sub-structure, with the number of repetitions specified by one of the fields. (I never actually programmed in COBOL, but I've had to deal with code that had to support COBOL-style data structures.)
- marktangotango 9y ago
  It's not as sophisticated as you may suppose :) https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_ibm_i_73/rzase/cbldevfiotapvarlen.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_ibm_i_73/...