Re:The Beauty of COBOL (2018)
by jacquesm on Friday October 18, 2019 @04:49AM
(#21289705)
From the wikipedia page on the subject:
"Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power."
Emphasis added. The machine code that went before was slow and very expensive to develop, and required detailed specifications to be handed to the programmers in order to be able to implement the software. COBOL was clearly an attempt at increasing the accessibility of programming for a larger audience than those that felt comfortable with machine language.
This succeeded admirably, many people joined the ranks of programmers with COBOL as their first language in a large variety of business applications. The jump in abstraction level between machine language and COBOL was very large.
"Representatives enthusiastically described a language that could work in a wide variety of environments, from banking and insurance to utilities and inventory control. They agreed unanimously that more people should be able to program and that the new language should not be restricted by the limitations of contemporary technology. A majority agreed that the language should make maximal use of English, be capable of change, be machine-independent and be easy to use, even at the expense of power."
Emphasis added. The machine code that went before was slow and very expensive to develop, and required detailed specifications to be handed to the programmers in order to be able to implement the software. COBOL was clearly an attempt at increasing the accessibility of programming for a larger audience than those that felt comfortable with machine language.
This succeeded admirably, many people joined the ranks of programmers with COBOL as their first language in a large variety of business applications. The jump in abstraction level between machine language and COBOL was very large.