Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died
Dijkstra said it best in 1975: <a href="https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E...</a><p>And before you get angry at me, answer this simple question: have you actually ever used COBOL? I spent a year of my life translating a COBOL mess into Delphi. It was horrible - the code I was working with had no functions (unless you think of a module defined in an entire file as a function), global scope on variables, and tons of ugly COBOL boilerplate, as dictated by the language.<p>And it's no surprise that COBOL was a historical dead-end. Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing.<p>That's why I'm hard-pressed to venerate anyone that had anything to do with perpetuating that mess.