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So there's no apparent rhyme or reason as to why some languages succumb whilst others flourish. But it was widely used (and maybe still is in its new guise of VB.NET). Undocumented side-effects between various features led frequently to undiagnosable run-time errors, fury and waste of time. Even then its bizarre flakiness could lead programmers such as myself to despair. It was no good for scientific, engineering or commercial applications, and was only really suited for interfacing other applications.
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It was entirely inadequate for anything remotely mission-critical. Visual Basic, the apparent successor to COBOL on the PC, was only fit for the most trivial and relatively menial applications.
#INTEL VISUAL FORTRAN COMPOSER GETTING STARTED SOFTWARE#
What an enormous shame that no mainstream software providers took up the challenge of producing a true PC Cobol, a Visual Cobol to which mainframe COBOL applications could have been migrated cleanly. My one-time employers spent a fortune in the late 1970's and early 80's developing a version that would sit comfortably on desk-top computers of any kind, but were overtaken by the IBM PC and very nearly went to the wall. Its data-structured architecture was unsurpassed by any other language that I encountered. It was all too easy to write the most appalling programs, incomprehensible even to their authors after a few months had elapsed (reminding us of the poet Browning who when asked the meaning of a particular passage of verse said that when he had written it, both he and God knew its meaning, but by now only God knew). This is not to claim that COBOL (or Fortran, for that matter) were by any means perfect.
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Their principal attraction was to DP managers hoping to make their programming staff redundant. Look at ADA, Algol, Pascal, PL1 – highly-sophisticated languages that were once expected to carry all before them: one is tempted to say they've come, they've gone, but some of them are admittedly still around – nevertheless they are hardly household names any longer.Īnd report generators were supposed to make commercial programming languages obsolete, but they were Procrustean beds into which every system specification had to be tortured by lopping or stretching, hammers looking for a nail. The upper-case of COBOL indicates that it hasn't and isn't. The lower-case of Fortran in the first link indicates that Fortran has made the cut, and is still with us. (In the same vein, we can reflect that the epochal IBM 360 and Cray operating systems were conceived by lone geniuses, Gene Amdahl and the eponymous Seymour the Tunnel Digger respectively.) Fortran and Cobol – no accident that they were the brain-children of 'single parents', creative individuals (John Backus and Grace Hopper respectively) rather than committees or project design teams.