I was reading through a survey of programming language history the other day in Michael Marcotty's Software Implementation, which includes this quote from Jean

I was reading through a survey of programming language history the other day in Michael Marcotty's Software Implementation, which includes this quote from Jean Sammet (1969): "COBOL ... encourages a certain amount of verbosity. The benefit gained from this, however, is increased readability and understandability in looking at programs." Marcotty writes: "The important thing is not whether the committee was right in its conclusion, but that a serious effort was being made to design a programming language for communication between people as well as with computers." To put this in context, consider this quote from Backus and Heising (1964) about Fortran: "[Our group] had one primary fear: ... an important application ... would run at half the speed of the hand-coded version. It was felt that such an occurrence ... would almost completely block acceptance of the system."