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by jerf
4054 days ago
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COBOL was a massive success. It is deployed everywhere and runs everything. COBOL was a massive failure. It had a goal of producing a language that business people could use directly with no intervening programmers by being "English-like" and friendly. This totally and utterly failed. These things are not contradictions. Further, everything I know that was designed to be "English-like", cut out the programmers, and let the business people program directly has been a total and utter failure, on that metric. By contrast, there's a number of things that business people directly use all the time without programmers, like Excel macros, that aren't trying to attain friendliness through "being like English". Maybe there's something out there that has done both, but I've not heard of it. I don't criticize COBOL for trying. It was an experiment that had to be tried, and I have strong opinions about it precisely because COBOL and others provide me the data points with which to have an opinion. But its popularity among programmers doesn't establish that it was successful in letting business people code directly. |
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I would agree, though in many cases (SQL particularly is a strong example) that's often more a failure of the organizations using the technology than the technology itself.
It doesn't matter if you have business-side analysts that can use SQL if you by policy don't let anyone outside of the IT side of an organization have access and tools that allow the user to use SQL directly against the database.
The IT-as-high-priesthood cult in organizations is strong, and resistant to any application of technology that challenges the priesthood. And this is, IME, especially true in organizations where the IT organization (and particularly its leadership) isn't particularly technically strong to start with.