Grace Hopper is a legend not because the tools she invented are great by modern standards, but because she laid the groundwork. She was also one of the earliest to recognize how important computing was going to be and that hand-writing everything in hex was not a great idea. Later she championed even higher-level abstractions. Programming at the start of her career was considered non-creative secretarial work for women to do, which has the dubious distinction of being wrong and sexist at the same time.
When judged by standards of the day COBOL wasn’t bad. It was one of the first examples of a high-level language. People’s experiences with it (and large undocumented spaghetti logic programs) helped inform the next generation of languages.
Later our (ongoing) experiences with the unsafety of C led to Java, C#, and D among others. Further reactions to those are Swift and Rust.
I’d argue we wouldn’t have any of those languages in the same form without COBOL.
COBOL was designed to read like plain English (a total fantasy, as English is not even close to a formal language) and be usable by non-programmers (a modern contradiction). It was also designed by committee to serve business needs, with almost no input from the academic community (and thus excluding almost every idea they thought was brilliant, revolutionary, or innovative.) Thus it has a fairly toxic pedigree.
Before you know you’re wrong most of the time you have to actually be wrong.
Cobol was first (or close to it) so it had to discover what “wrong” meant in the context of programming languages.
They had no way of knowing back then that having a programming language for non-programmers is a hard problem, close to impossible. Same goes for the natural language bit.
With the benefit of hindisght, yeah, we can make fun of it. It doesn’t make us right, though.
Doesn't make us right about what? You want me to ignore the hindsight I do have just so I can say COBOL wasn't a bad as it was? This seems to be exactly the kind of thing that you shouldn't have to commit yourself to before knowing it is wrong.
>They had no way of knowing back then that having a programming language for non-programmers is a hard problem, close to impossible
They had a very easy way of knowing this. Ask an actual non-programmer to write code. And do this during the design process.
>Cobol was first (or close to it) so it had to discover what “wrong” meant in the context of programming languages.
They had to discover that ignoring all of the existing computer science literature on language design would lead to poor language design? And that employing an untalented design team would lead to a poor spec? Sorry, but I don't buy it. I certainly don't see some grand lesson that anybody learned from it that we didn't already learn from the previous hundred years of research and design.
I suspect that this says something about COBOL.