There is a temporal nexus circa 1980 between the vilification of Cobol; the rise of Ada and with it a myth of the woman programmer as subordinate to the brilliant genius; and the beginnings of the decline in women computer science majors in US universities [from 36% to 7% today].
There is a trade off between a language that is easy to read and that is easy to write.
There is no factual support for this assertion yet it stands as the unquestioned argument against languages like Hopper's[et al] Cobol. It is used to silence an alternative way of writing, to suppress an alternative means of expression and explicitly the only one with a claim to a feminine origin.
Certainly it's not the case that English-like programming languages have disappeared. There isn't a single widely used language that doesn't use English keywords and one of the major arguments against Lisp is it's non-English like syntax...all those parenthesis and verbs at the front. No, the argument against Grace Hopper's languages is that they are not the missionary position.
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Second reply in a different vein:
There is a temporal nexus circa 1980 between the vilification of Cobol; the rise of Ada and with it a myth of the woman programmer as subordinate to the brilliant genius; and the beginnings of the decline in women computer science majors in US universities [from 36% to 7% today].
There is a trade off between a language that is easy to read and that is easy to write.
There is no factual support for this assertion yet it stands as the unquestioned argument against languages like Hopper's[et al] Cobol. It is used to silence an alternative way of writing, to suppress an alternative means of expression and explicitly the only one with a claim to a feminine origin.
Certainly it's not the case that English-like programming languages have disappeared. There isn't a single widely used language that doesn't use English keywords and one of the major arguments against Lisp is it's non-English like syntax...all those parenthesis and verbs at the front. No, the argument against Grace Hopper's languages is that they are not the missionary position.