I like the commenter on that page disagree with the stats but I would assert that COBOL is still the best business DSL ever written. the whole language is about

I like the commenter on that page disagree with the stats but I would assert that COBOL is still the best business DSL ever written. the whole language is about doing typical business things. Mostevery other language I have used, looked at, is at the primitives level upon which one has to build the functions to make it equivalent to COBOL for writing a simple accounting program. Add to this it's IO is basically just the 2 fundamentals of record based read write and queues(yes COBOL had queues in 70s). if you have written large business systems with multiple data storage backend, and its distributed, and it needs to manage it's own load balancing, then COBOL was brilliant. Still is. world (and a lot of HN readers) needs to change mindset away from this lang versus that lang towards a this DSL and its problem space versus others DSL and its problem space. For me if I had to write a payroll engine I would prefer use COBOL than javascript but would likely turn to java just because of easier to get reference material. I learned fortran, Pascal, cobol. then worked in COBOL and assembler. then RPG and awk. nowadays mostly python, javascript, some c for projects. FWIW I aspire to learn and use Ada.