> COBOL was intended to do away with programmers and to allow their managers to interact with the computer directly. This is incorrect. COBOL has as its defini

> COBOL was intended to do away with programmers and to allow their managers to interact with the computer directly. This is incorrect. COBOL has as its definition “COmmon Business Oriented Language.” It can be argued that COBOL was the first compiler widely used, but to say it was meant to “do away with programmers” is to ignore that application programmers were the intended beneficiaries of no longer having to work strictly in machine code.