The English Programming Language
As someone who worked on a 35 million loc cobol and jcl system for several years in the late 90's, I don't find this to be funny at all. Cobol was purported to be readable with english language like syntax to make it more understandable. Giving gems such as:<p><pre><code>    MULTIPLY TAX-RATE OF STATE(43) BY BALANCE GIVING SALES-TAX-AMOUNT.
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Note the period is sigificant.