I assumed that too (and laughed aloud at the time). The man who introduced me to computer programming (blessings upon him!) got us writing code the very first day. I remember him asking us "so you have to write a program that compares two numbers and tells you which one is greater. What's the first thing the program has to do?" After a few wrong guesses from us (write out the bigger number? Look at the two numbers?) he said "You have to GET THE FIRST NUMBER", and he wrote GET NUMBERA on the board. I suppose he spent a (very) little time explaining about a variable name before getting us to tell him that the second statement should be GET NUMBERB.
The class was in PL/1, so GET and PUT were right there waiting for him to use without having to explain very much. I don't know whether it was because of this approach, or because I'm just naturally drawn to such things (and there's no doubt I am), or maybe I've simply forgotten after all these years what it was like to learn a computer language for the first time. But most computer languages seem pretty obvious to me. Oh, I wasted some time being confused about the concept of methods in VBA, when I first started using it, and of course APL is an exception. So, maybe, is LISP, though I never seriously tackled it. But it never seemed to me that COBOL statements were any easier to learn, or more intuitive, than those of FORTRAN or Basic. And the structure! All that stuff about the four divisions, and especially the ENVIRONMENT division, I didn't find them intuitive at all. But I'm not so much saying that you're wrong about COBOL being easy to learn as that personally I find ALL languages easy to learn - and that may be just an idiosyncrasy of mine, especially having learned a number of them. And by the way, we were six weeks into that PL/C class when I ran across someone taking COBOL the same semester. They were just learning about the concept of loops, and had not yet written their first program. That's a terrible way to learn coding, for which I blame not COBOL but their instructor. If for my sins I ever have to teach a COBOL class, I may not be able to get them writing PROCEDURE DIVISION statements the first day, but surely by the second... --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* It is always the right time to do the right thing. -Martin Luther King, Jr. */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Jon Perryman Sent: Sunday, July 30, 2023 16:57 I assume this is sarcasm about problems with Cobol. There are very few peculiarities to Cobol and these are often easily learned very quickly. Languages like C and C++ are not intuitive to a non-computer person. Of the languages, which is more intuitive to a layperson? --- On Saturday, July 29, 2023 at 01:50:52 PM PDT, Paul Gilmartin <0000042bfe9c879d-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu> wrote: > However, COBOL can be coded using everyday, non-specialized English > vocabulary such as "LEVEL 77". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
