your favorite programming language and why?

[hollysmom]

42. hey! I was the year 2000 manager and found lots of COBOL errors -

I worked night and day and could not even think about investments put all my salary in CDs - this paid for my retirement when I was laid off at 58 because all work was going to India - except they offered me a job if I would move to India and manage the same projects for the Indian team and do all the user interface. Most money I ever made in my life, but my Mom had a stroke just after we finished, so I lost the last active year of her life. Not worth it.

The one benefit of COBOL that should not be understated is that it was easy to find people who knew it, not knew it well, but knew it. I was a Mark IV specialist for a while and the thing that amazed me what how few people knew how it worked and the code they wrote was needlessly foolish - I once changed an 8 hour running program to an almost instant one by changing the definition of one field. They had the system converting back and forth from text to number every time someone used it and they used it almost every line - so simple just to define it as a number. To use any language well, you should know a little bit about under the hood.