> COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. Is it not? I mean, look at teenagers playing with garage band. They're making music, but not using

> COBOL is obsolete in a way that sheet music just isn't. Is it not? I mean, look at teenagers playing with garage band. They're making music, but not using anything remotely like traditional notation. Pop guitarists have long since abandoned staves for tablature. Even very talented professional singers on broadway are often unable to sight read a melody. You're right that if you want to learn, I dunno, the clarinet, there is a long tradition of tutorial and practice material in traditional notation that will take you all the way up to master level. And that's good and worth celebrating and preserving. But it's not an argument that there isn't a better way to notate music for the clarinet! Again: no one writes COBOL. No one writes COBOL even for the tasks (c.f. batch processed accounting systems) COBOL was good at. And the reason is that we invented better tools and adopted them. It strains reason to argue that a 4-century old collection of kludges and hacks can't be improved upon.