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I believe that's the sole reason why COBOL was invented in the first place: to teach non-engineers to program a computer (I think it targeted the Air Force init

by yan 17y ago

I believe that's the sole reason why COBOL was invented in the first place: to teach non-engineers to program a computer (I think it targeted the Air Force initially..)

gaius 17y ago
It's not that said clerks were incapable of learning to program; rather the project failed because they weren't be taught to program per se but to apply a rote process that mechanistically turned specifications into applications. Still I dare say IBM got what they wanted out of it, which was to convince more people to buy more mainframes on the grounds that programmers for them were plentiful...