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And COBOL before that. The goal of COBOL was to allow a non-technical business person to describe the problem in English and that description could be used as t

And COBOL before that. The goal of COBOL was to allow a non-technical business person to describe the problem in English and that description could be used as the basis of the program. Needless to say it didn't work. Accurately describing what a program should do is what a programmer does. We're not telling the computer what to do (move this value from memory into this register, etc). We're describing a program's behaviour. So I think we'll just get another language that is a good fit for describing what the program should do, and instead of compiling that to machine code, it will be used to train a model.

hwayne 4y ago
COBOL actually worked pretty well for its time. The ultimate reason COBOL died was because it was a first generation language that nobody really iterated on. It's similar to how most of us don't use FORTRAN, ALGOL, or LISP 1.5. Unlike those, COBOL didn't have the backing of the "tech world" (at the time, IBM and universities), so it doesn't have descendant languages we do use.
- dgb23 4y ago
  > COBOL actually worked pretty well for its time. It was still programmers using the language. Same story with SQL. The only things you can give people who don't invest a substantial amount of time and effort into the craft are markup languages and very high level (configuration) DSLs.
  - edanm 4y ago
    > It was still programmers using the language. Same story with SQL. What are you talking about? Vast swaths of non-programmers are using SQL every day. Unless you consider anyone who writes SQL to be a programmer, in which case what you say is true by definition.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  I don't understand why it didn't have the backing of the "tech world" and yet billions (if not trillions) of lines of COBOL are still being executed today? When I first joined the industry, back in the early 90's, COBOL was very much the premier business coding language, and I think that only changed with the arrival of Java. Can you explain further?

hwayne 4y ago

COBOL actually worked pretty well for its time. The ultimate reason COBOL died was because it was a first generation language that nobody really iterated on. It's similar to how most of us don't use FORTRAN, ALGOL, or LISP 1.5. Unlike those, COBOL didn't have the backing of the "tech world" (at the time, IBM and universities), so it doesn't have descendant languages we do use.

dgb23 4y ago
> COBOL actually worked pretty well for its time. It was still programmers using the language. Same story with SQL. The only things you can give people who don't invest a substantial amount of time and effort into the craft are markup languages and very high level (configuration) DSLs.
- edanm 4y ago
  > It was still programmers using the language. Same story with SQL. What are you talking about? Vast swaths of non-programmers are using SQL every day. Unless you consider anyone who writes SQL to be a programmer, in which case what you say is true by definition.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
I don't understand why it didn't have the backing of the "tech world" and yet billions (if not trillions) of lines of COBOL are still being executed today? When I first joined the industry, back in the early 90's, COBOL was very much the premier business coding language, and I think that only changed with the arrival of Java. Can you explain further?