I would add that in the era cobol was designed and rose to prominence, assembler was used for both. Cobol enshrined the application assembler practices of the time, all memory was statically declared, no dynamic memory allocation, no call stack, just gotos and conditional branching, and mapping fixed length data from tape drives into memory. Note this all made cobol very stable and even secure (no possibility for buffer overflows for example).
Also clearly not what was needed for true systems programming.
PERFORM COUNT-ROWS VARYING COUNT FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL EOF.
And the callee did:
READ INPUT-FILE AT END MOVE 1 TO EOF-FLAG.
1. No unnecessary periods in the code
2. Required periods (ending paragraphs and if/then/else) go on a line by themselves
For example when I write Java code, I don't care if the VM is implemented in C, C++, Assembly, hardware or whatever.
Just like when I upload the jar file into a cloud instance app engine, usually I don't care if the JVM is running on top of some OS, bare metal or whatever it making it run.
Yet, there is a group of developers that is making that illusion possible for the rest of us.
The "best" we have to offer today as "pure" business logic programing is some BPMN framework/platform.. and that is mostly hell of Earth..
COBOL is not coming back because that time has passed, however something with the basic essence and principals of COBOL is desperately needed. Don't ask me what and how because I don't know either.
Do cloud plateforms fall under BPMN frameworks/plateforms? From what I understand, it's possible to build applications today using cloud plateforms (AWS and Azure mostly, I don't know about the others) for auth, persistance, etc; while only writing your business logic, especially now with serverless where you only write functions.
In a way this is the return of the distinction between application and system, but the system is left to another company. This would fit with the (anecdotal) pattern I've noticed where before companies had cleaning people, IT people, etc and now everything is subcontracted to other companies.
In the past, there was a divide between systems and application programmers. Roughly, the systems programmers took care about the details of the infrastructure and resource access, while the application programmers worried about the "business logic" of the applications.
After the microcomputer revolution, new languages emerged and this divide was lost. "Modern" languages such as C or Java do not make this distinction. Today, programmers are supposed to be interchangeable, and they are supposed to work equally well on system infrastructure and application logic. I suspect it's partly the pride, because infrastructure work is often seen as more attractive - all the distributed algorithms stuff, scaling, etc.
To me interesting question is, was this divide valuable and should we return to it? I think so. With the advent of functional programming, it is possible to understand applications a layers of translation between different languages (see https://degoes.net/articles/modern-fp-part-2), where the language of the business problem is at the top layer, and the language of the operating system is at the bottom layer. The (application) programmers, working on the upper layers, should specialize in the application domain, and the (system) programmers, working on the lower layers, should specialize in computer systems.