> This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages.

I have heard others and myself describe COBOL in many ways, most involving creative expletive phraseology which would make a sailor blush, but "low level/terse language" is a new one to me.

> But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper ...

LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC.

Saying we don't need "programmers" any more was true when a programmer was someone who used very low level languages such as Assembly and probably had used punched cards in the past etc. Languages like cobol / fortran / plsql gave analysts a chance of designing things on paper and handing off to developers or even doing the development themselves which couldn't have happened in the past. Using something like python these days feels like the kind of thing that would have been thought of as a 4gl in those days for some use cases. However, python also works as a general purpose programming language.

Do you mean something other than "terse" here? Or are you perhaps thinking of a different language? I cannot possibly imagine that adjective being used to describe COBOL. It is the #1 textbook example of a verbose language--the opposite of terse.