As far as I can tell, he's saying that history repeats itself, and the same sort of itch that Ruby on Rails scratches was also scratched in Cobol. This is defin

As far as I can tell, he's saying that history repeats itself, and the same sort of itch that Ruby on Rails scratches was also scratched in Cobol. This is definitely a recurring theme in computing -- "what's old is new again", "those who dont' know history are doomed to repeat it", and so on. I can't judge the accuracy of this statement, and I definitely disagree with his conclusion that new languages are bad. I do long for a common ABI (like VMS had, for that matter) though. It seems like Microsoft is aiming for this with the CLR. What's old is new again.