COBOL as a Programming Language

I worked with COBOL near the end of my last contract and found aspects of it fascinating compared to today's languages. Everything is about structures that map directly to the bits on disk, with fine grain control on precision and data types. But then the language reads as a series of macros where you don't have to remember the low level details: do this to this, put this here, if this do that. It's also a terribly difficult language to parse because it was designed for ease of use by humans...

 The Epoch of Potential Memory

One can see Manovich’s argument becoming true in the development of database technology the 20th century. The first commercially available computer databases were organized hierarchically. If you wanted to get to a particular piece of information, you went to the overarching category and made a series of choices as this category broke down into groups then subgroups until you got to the specific piece of information that you required. This mode of traveling through a database was called “navi...

 The Bilingual Advantage in Computer Programmers

Like bilinguals, expert computer programmers successfully manage two or more separate lexicons, grammars and divergent concepts, avoiding inadvertent transfer between the two. Numerous studies of novice programmers indicate that they struggle to do achieve this division; transfer from natural language creates bugs (e.g. Soloway and Spohrer, 1989; Witschital, 1995). The present study therefore considers whether the “bilingual advantage” in executive control is found in computer programmers. [...