The truth about JCL is actually worse than "they were on drugs". In fact, they gave themselves a goal of avoiding making it into a programming language, except

The truth about JCL is actually worse than "they were on drugs". In fact, they gave themselves a goal of avoiding making it into a programming language, except unfortunately real life requirements meant it had to gather such features quickly. Other infamous components came because of need to specify in line all sorts of metadata for I/O, because the OS might not have a place to store it - this caused the infamous DD statement that /bin/dd is a joking refence to. In retrospective, one of the leads on JCL mentioned that they should have instead gone straight for a full programming language, that this way it would have better design.