Why has anybody ever used COBOL?

Posted by sarzl on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by sarzl
Published on 2010-04-13T12:27:10Z Indexed on 2010/04/13 12:32 UTC
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I know: You and me hate COBOL. I took a look at a lot of code examples and it didn't take me long to know why everybody tries to avoid it.

So I really have no idea:

Why was COBOL ever used?

I mean: Hey - there was Fortran before it, and Fortran looks like a jesus-language compared to COBOL.

This isn't argumentative but historical as I'm young and didn't even know about COBOL before 4 months.

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