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Actually, I quite liked COBOL.

It was singular in being the best language where you could pick up a program that you had written many years before and 'get up to speed' in understanding what it did in very quick time.

It might have been long-winded and very wordy to write, but it was originally designed to be easy to read. It was.

On the other hand BASIC was the worst. I gave up trying to understand what was happening in some programs that I had written because they were just impossible to read if you hadn't looked at them for six months.

Really? Wow.

I've often heard that said of C and other curly-braces languages, and of Perl, but rarely of BASIC.

Of course, a lot of it is how clearly someone wrote it in the first place. I've seen immaculate Perl, for instance. I don't know Perl and I could still read it.