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. (Sun FORTRAN 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)

COBOL is for morons. (Edsger Dijkstra)

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular. (Ken Thompson)

With respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist. (Edsger Dijkstra)

The very architecture of almost every computer today is designed to optimize the performance of Fortran programs and its operating-system-level sister, C. (Peter Gabriel)

The Windows API has done more to retard skill development than anything since COBOL maintenance. (Larry O'Brien)

COBOL: (Synonymous with evil.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by card wallopers to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. (Jargon File)

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Philip Greenspun)

COBOL programmers are destined to code COBOL for the rest of their lives, and thereafter. (Bertrand Meyer)

I think conventional languages are for the birds. They're just extensions of the von Neumann computer, and they keep our noses in the dirt of dealing with individual words and computing addresses, and doing all kinds of silly things like that, things that we've picked up from programming for computers; we've built them into programming languages; we've built them into Fortran; we've built them in PL/1; we've built them into almost every language. (John Backus)

If you can't do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing. (Ed Post)

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. (Paul Graham)

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days. (Marvin Minsky)

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline! (Edsger Dijkstra)

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Our IBM Salesmen (to the tune of Jingle Bells)

IBM, Happy men, smiling all the way.
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IBM, Watson men, partners of TJ.
In his service to mankind -- that’s why we are so gay.

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