The worst programming language ever

[DGM]

I also started in COBOL (toml_12953 and I are almost the same age, according to his bio). As Master Po from the old Kung Fu series might say, COBOL is not the worst programming language, Grace Hopper (see what I did there?). The worst language is the one in which the programs are hardest to maintain.

Where I worked, I was maintaining code full of GOTO statements and labels for data and code which were named for the programmer, his wife, his friends and enemies, and there was little or no documentation. COBOL allowed (and encouraged) long descriptive names (they called it self-documenting). When we wrote new code, there were several steps to the process. Step one was documentation: what the program was for, what data it used, inputs and outputs and report design. That was after the program was requested and approved, and all the documentation had to be approved as well.

In 1982, there was an input program I had to write and I noticed that one input was a date. The program could only accept inputs in a range between one year before and six months after the date in a header record for the file. We used two-digit years in the code, and that bothered me. So with my boss's permission, I made my input program Y2K compatible. We ended up not using it up to 2000, but only because we bought a new system with prewritten input programs, in the late 1990s.