It was great at the time - the punch card department was fully unionised, and only the supervisor could do the plugboards. Then came assembler, which was *hard*. COBOL was a revelation - agree the flowchart with the user in the morning, handpunch your own program cards and test pack during the afternoon, and run the test (slow tapes) in an overnight batch. Nearly self-documenting - until some nark introduced non-verbal variable-names.
The only equivalent revelation I've had in my closing years has been UML with free 'JUDE' (Community) from Japan, but I'll never get my failing neurones round object orientation at this stage. http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/index.html
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It was great at the time - the punch card department was fully unionised, and only the supervisor could do the plugboards. Then came assembler, which was *hard*. COBOL was a revelation - agree the flowchart with the user in the morning, handpunch your own program cards and test pack during the afternoon, and run the test (slow tapes) in an overnight batch. Nearly self-documenting - until some nark introduced non-verbal variable-names. The only equivalent revelation I've had in my closing years has been UML with free 'JUDE' (Community) from Japan, but I'll never get my failing neurones round object orientation at this stage. http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/index.html