IT World: COBOL, like Star Trek, needs a new generation

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

2. FORTRAN has a firm base

It is used heavily by physicists and astronomers, among other things because it has a large mathematical function library which has had all the bugs beaten out years ago.

One comment on COBOL. About 30 years ago, I attended a talk given by Grace Hopper. I asked her, "When you developed COBOL, you intended it to be 'self-documenting', so that managers could read the code and understand what the program was doing. In your experience, how many managers have actually done this?" She laughed, and replied, "To the best of my knowledge, none."