alt Hacker News> 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.
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andsoitis • 10/02/2024
> LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC.
Correct. Fortran, LISP, and COBOL were invented in ‘57, ‘58, and ‘59, respectively.
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> LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC
I didn't mean to imply COBOL was anything close to the first programming language, only that I was speculating what 'programming' generally meant within computer culture at the time. I was not around at that time- but I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s, whereas it is far less common nowadays.
I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era? I suspect it was well after COBOL came out. Surely there is a lag time for any new programming language to become commonplace.
I couldn't find any data on that, but I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal. I often forget how slow new things propagated through the culture in pre-internet times.