This doesn't contradict the parent comment. They claimed that COBOL was intended to be used by non-programmers, not that it necessarily succeeded.
(It's also possible that it succeeded by its original intention but appeared to fail as the definition of "programmer" changed i.e. if it originally meant someone who understood assembler but it later came to mean someone who spent their time writing programs. I could imagine this being the case, as someone who writes javascript today (or even VBA for Excel!) isn't really comparable to someone who wrote code in the 1950s, but both might be called "programmers".)
Having said all that, for what little it's worth, in a software history course I was taught that COBOL was intended to be written by programmers (in the full-time professional sense) but be readable by managers. I imagine that it did not even succeed at that.
This doesn't contradict the parent comment. They claimed that COBOL was intended to be used by non-programmers, not that it necessarily succeeded.
(It's also possible that it succeeded by its original intention but appeared to fail as the definition of "programmer" changed i.e. if it originally meant someone who understood assembler but it later came to mean someone who spent their time writing programs. I could imagine this being the case, as someone who writes javascript today (or even VBA for Excel!) isn't really comparable to someone who wrote code in the 1950s, but both might be called "programmers".)
Having said all that, for what little it's worth, in a software history course I was taught that COBOL was intended to be written by programmers (in the full-time professional sense) but be readable by managers. I imagine that it did not even succeed at that.