
“The New COBOL” (Benno Rice): what will be the *next* most-hated language? - lproven
https://youtu.be/BCqGjGzWI48
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simonblack
Actually, I quite liked COBOL.

It was singular in being the best language where you could pick up a program
that you had written many years before and 'get up to speed' in understanding
what it did in very quick time.

It might have been long-winded and very wordy to write, but it was originally
designed to be easy to read. It was.

On the other hand BASIC was the worst. I gave up trying to understand what was
happening in some programs that I had written because they were just
impossible to read if you hadn't looked at them for six months.

~~~
lproven
Really? Wow.

I've often heard that said of C and other curly-braces languages, and of Perl,
but rarely of BASIC.

Of course, a lot of it is how clearly someone wrote it in the first place.
I've seen immaculate Perl, for instance. I don't know Perl and I could still
read it.

