COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others (for business data processing) are so much worse. — Robert Glass
FORTRAN’s DO statement is far scarier than GOTO ever was. Nothing can match the sheer gibbering horror of the ‘come from’ loop if the programmer didn’t document it well.
— Mark Hughes
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
— Edsger Dijkstra
As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!
— Ed Post
I knew I’d hate COBOL the moment I saw they’d used perform instead of do.
— Larry Wall
Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
— Reference Manual
Eiffel: The Programming Language is certainly by far the most expensive piece of fiction on my bookshelf. Excellent, entertaining fiction, but it remains fiction nevertheless. — Lasse Petersen
Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench.
— Charles Petzold
When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
— Edsger Dijkstra
A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don’t have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.
— Ed Yourdon
A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard. — John Krueger
You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers.
— Steven Feiner
The tree large enough that a stake capable of killing COBOL could be fashioned from its trunk has not yet grown anywhere upon the face of this verdant planet.
— Dan Martinez
Eiffel has perhaps the image of a cruel professor giving students tough assignments and not accepting excuses. C/C++, on the other hand, has an almost sports-car image.
— John Nagle
From a practical viewpoint, it’s easy to see that C will always be with us, taking a place beside Fortran and Cobol as the right tool for certain jobs.
— Larry O'Brien
C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good.
— Bertrand Meyer
You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar. — Bill Joy