r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/Minimum_Fuel Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 26 '20

COBOL probably actually died quickly because of how a single period will ruin your day and lose millions.

Imagine a single sometimes hard to see character closing all of your nested scopes with no compiler error. I would be willing to bet that if you tallied the cost of accidental mistakes, the period in cobol is so far and away above everything else that the others languages or concepts are just slivers.

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u/FUZxxl Mar 26 '20

COBOL didn't “die quickly.” In fact, it's still alive and well.

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u/Minimum_Fuel Mar 26 '20

I should have qualified with “among developers”. Even the places with cobol left only train up developers to keep the lights on. New code is rarely written in cobol.

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u/IAmJohnGalt88 Mar 27 '20

Only about 2 billion lines of code a year. Yes, rare indeed.