People have lost sight of the original intention of COBOL’s designers. To quote one of them, Jean Sammet: The users for whom COBOL was designed were … - Gerald M. Weinberg

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People have lost sight of the original intention of COBOL’s designers. To quote one of them, Jean Sammet: The users for whom COBOL was designed were actually two subclasses of those people concerned with business data processing problems. One is the relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anybody who had not written the program initially. In other words, the readability of COBOL programs would provide documentation to all who might wish to examine the programs, including the supervisory or management personnel. Little attempt was made to cater to professional programmers…