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Discussion on: "The Beauty of the COBOL Programming Language"

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Bruce Axtens

From Why it is important to know about the history of programming languages:

This site is concerned with the idea-historical treatment of the development of programming languages as a means of human expression and creation.

In 1976, at the History of Computing Conference in Los Alamos, Richard Hamming described why we might be interested in the history of computing: "we would know what they thought when they did it".

We need to know why the people who designed programming languages thought the way they did. When they designed languages, they made conscious choices, which we have to live with. And they made those choices for a wide variety of reasons, as many as the reasons for which they felt the need to create a language in the first place.

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ciscospice

Great insight. Coming back to programming from data network design and support, it’s also true of routing and LAN protocols. Radia Perlman’s book, Interconnections, is a great example.
oreilly.com/library/view/interconn...