I wrote a COBOL program once - a very long time ago. It was not required in any classes I took, but I was fascinated by different languages and wanted to learn what I could, so I made an attempt to write small programs in any of a number of languages - apl, lisp, prolog, snobol, algol. Eventually, I ended up taking a class in lisp and did my final project for ai in it, but the others I've completely forgotten (and glad to have done so).

Cobol is possibly the most irritating language I've ever encountered. One sample was enough and I've never had a remote interest in trying another. My wife did quite a bit of cobol work at a bank once I think. But even that changed to C later (much better choice). I think people tend to learn things and think "ah, okay, things have been decided. this is how it will be." This might have been a useful paradigm 500 years ago. (I'm just as bad, though. I remember once about 20 years ago I decided I would *not* learn another frigging editor and so I stuck with teco and for several years steadfastly refused to even attempt using full-screen editors. Edit like a *man*, by god, with a character oriented editor!)

(I will say that doing windows programming without a gui builder is even more irritating than cobol, but most people use gui builders, I think.)

I like some of the jargon of computers, but not all. I particularly dislike terms that sound like cool-speak, or shibboleths of the in-crowd (like infobahn).

Ah, here's a phrase that I suspect came from computers that's pretty handy "having cycles to spare" as in "I could really use John's help on my new project, but I don't think he has any cycles to spare."



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