21 Jun
2006
21 Jun
'06
6:43 p.m.
Brian L. Stuart wrote:
- those who think there are two kinds of people in the world
- those who don't!
:>
From: Sean
Conner <spc at conman.org>
But that
aside, I can only think of a few that did not rely upon punctuation that
much. COBOL is one (although I don't know it well enough to say).
When Grace Hopper spoke at one of the National Computer Conference
Founder's Days, she mentioned some things about COBOL syntax
that I thought were rather insightful. She said there are two kinds of
people in the world. There are those of us who are basically
mathematicians, and we like to replace words with symbols. Then
there are the non-mathematicians who want to describe symbols
in words. COBOL was created for the latter group.
Unfortunately, the former type ends up creating products
that the *latter* type have to use! (which, perhaps, explains
why so many products are poorly designed?)