skeleton567 (5/15/2014)
Ralph Hightower (5/15/2014)
Try programming in APL. That is one bizarre language!I'm not sure without researching it if APL and what we called in the old days Assembler Language are the same thing, but I've "been there, done that". It was a very efficient, fast, compact, precise tool and we always used it for the most exacting critical tasks. You had to be a real 'programmer' to use it, and we didn't have the naive folks 'managing' development. Real, experienced Systems Analysts were in charge and we got things right in development. Bugs in software were taken seriously and all identified were fixed without waiting for a 'next release'. Then along came the likes of COBOL which made so-called 'programmers' of those who weren't and shouldn't have been.
The industry really couldn't afford to code everything in assembler, there actually is a benefit to higher level languages, and COBOL at the time really brought benefits over assembler and to most folks in the industry it was a real no brainer. The resulting increase of the worlds programmer population was inevitably going to bring in folks who weren't up to your standards, but its worth considering how far we would have got if we stuck with assembler for everything, I'd hazard a guess not very far 😉