> A highly talented programmer will be less productive using COBOL and older tools and technologies, but will not be an order of magnitude less productive. I'm

> A highly talented programmer will be less productive using COBOL and older tools and technologies, but will not be an order of magnitude less productive. I'm not sure about that, especially if you replace COBOL with assembly language. Definitely if you replace COBOL with machine code encodings, or punch cards. Part of the disparity amongst individual programmers can be attributed to tooling, and we have no way of knowing how much that is. I think we can agree the paper is saying: "Programming is inherently complicated, and we predict that our current tools already reduce complexity almost as much as possible". I just disagree with that prediction, and think our tools currently encompass massive amounts of accidental complexity which easily dwarf the essential complexity.