Excerpt :
Many of these men fancied themselves to be a cut above the programmers who came before, and they often perceived COBOL as inferior and unattractive, in part because it did not require abstruse knowledge of underlying computer hardware or a computer science qualification.
Consciously or not, the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise.
In a broader sense, hating COBOL was—and is—part of a struggle between consolidating and protecting computer programmers’ professional prestige on the one hand, and making programming less opaque and more accessible on the other. There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” In other words, if your code is easy to understand, maybe you and your skills aren’t all that unique or valuable. If management thinks the tools you use and the code you write could be easily learned by anyone, you are eminently replaceable.
one contemporary programmer, who works mainly in C++ and Java at IBM, told me, “Every new programming language that comes out that makes things simpler in some way is usually made fun of by some contingent of existing programmers as making programming too easy—or they say it’s not a ‘real language.’”
“It’s about gatekeeping, and keeping one’s prestige and importance in the face of technological advancements that make it easier to be replaced by new people with easier to use tools.” Gatekeeping is not only done by people and institutions; it’s written into programming languages themselves.
modern computing has started to become undone, and to undo other parts of our societies, through the field’s high opinion of itself, and through the way that it concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results.
In order to care for technological infrastructure, we need maintenance engineers, not just systems designers—and that means paying for people, not just for products.
Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.
The blessing and the curse of good infrastructure is that when it works, it is invisible: which means that too often, we don’t devote much care to it until it collapses.
