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My guess is that you have not written a line of COBOL code. I have seen great systems written in COBOL. My guess is why COBOL never caught on in the PC world is
by testrun 12y ago
My guess is that you have not written a line of COBOL code. I have seen great systems written in COBOL. My guess is why COBOL never caught on in the PC world is that COBOL is very much suited for batch programming. There were a few tries with a visual form of COBOL, but the tool set was very expensive and the alternatives were cheaper and more suited to events (for instance Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, the Microsoft products).
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago> I have seen great systems written in COBOL. That's not really the point. The problem is not that you can't do something great. Every Turing-complete language has the capacity to do that. You can write a great program in Brainfuck. The problem is that they encourage you to do something terrible. I have seen COBOL programs that I did not wish to see. Good languages make it easier to do the right thing. They provide strong type checking even for user-defined types and well-tested abstractions (like templates/generics) so that you don't have twelve copies of the same function one for each expected input, each slowly diverging and multiplying under maintenance and developing their own subtly different bugs.