It’s by design very verbose and “English”-like, like instead of x=y*z it would go “MULTIPLY y BY z GIVING x”, the idea was that it would read almost like natural language, so that non-tech staff could understand it.
Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path.
Yeah. And a lot of non-programmers became programmers thanks to Cobol.
I think we’re seeing this effect with AI code copilots, as well. It can’t replace a programmer, but it can elevate a potential programmer to proficient (in at least some tasks) faster than was possible before.
I know it theoretically means I earn less than I might have, but for my whole career there’s been so much more to be done than there are of us to do it, anyway.
Everything that comes later, less so.
Yeah. They really need to get off my lawn with this nonsense. We’ve seen this enough times to know that it’ll be great, but still won’t solve all our problems.
Except that it’s not the syntax that makes programming hard, it’s the thought process, right?
Exactly!
And, of course, AI doesn’t help with the thought process at all, but did made the syntax much simpler to deal with, once again.
So - once again - people who don’t understand what you just pointed out, now believe we don’t need programmers anymore. Just like the last several times that we “didn’t need programmers anymore”, for basically the same reason.
I understand that we rinse and repeat the same nonsense for networking, systems administrator, etc, every few years. Some people genuinely believe that the computers are someday going to magically start understanding themselves for us.
It’s by design very verbose and “English”-like, like instead of x=y*z it would go “MULTIPLY y BY z GIVING x”, the idea was that it would read almost like natural language, so that non-tech staff could understand it.
Except that it’s not the syntax that makes programming hard, it’s the thought process, right?
Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path. Everything that comes later, less so.
Yeah. And a lot of non-programmers became programmers thanks to Cobol.
I think we’re seeing this effect with AI code copilots, as well. It can’t replace a programmer, but it can elevate a potential programmer to proficient (in at least some tasks) faster than was possible before.
I know it theoretically means I earn less than I might have, but for my whole career there’s been so much more to be done than there are of us to do it, anyway.
Yeah. They really need to get off my lawn with this nonsense. We’ve seen this enough times to know that it’ll be great, but still won’t solve all our problems.
Exactly!
And, of course, AI doesn’t help with the thought process at all, but did made the syntax much simpler to deal with, once again.
So - once again - people who don’t understand what you just pointed out, now believe we don’t need programmers anymore. Just like the last several times that we “didn’t need programmers anymore”, for basically the same reason.
I understand that we rinse and repeat the same nonsense for networking, systems administrator, etc, every few years. Some people genuinely believe that the computers are someday going to magically start understanding themselves for us.