Abs of the day: COBOL

this does not spark joy

it's easy to judge the language of bygone eras with the lessons we learned from those very eras. What bugs me about COBOL is that its philosophy consists of one sentence marketing fluffs that are easy to refute if we begin to construct a logical framework to think about it. Its contemporaries were already realizing that syntax is a fact when COBOL sold very long Latin letter operators as "basically English".

One positive I can say about COBOL is that it's easy to virtualize; I have no doubt that this was the central reason why it stuck around for so long.

Looking at Cobol…