Interesting that they used COBOL as the example language - COBOL was itself an attempt to do the same thing. It was thought that ordinary businessfolk could cre

Interesting that they used COBOL as the example language - COBOL was itself an attempt to do the same thing. It was thought that ordinary businessfolk could create programs without "learning to code" because COBOL is so close to English. That didn't work out well. As any software dev knows, the problem is not the language. The problem is that the vague musings of an "ideas guy" cannot be turned into an actual program without a lot of guesswork, refinement, clarification, "filling-in", and outright lying. The required understanding and precision of description is just not that far from the understanding and precision required to write the code.