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:    MULTIPLY TAX-RATE OF STATE(43) BY BALANCE GIVING SALES-TAX-AMOUNT.

Note the period is sigificant.