Yes. COBOL can be excused because it was the first time anyone was going down that path.

Yeah. And a lot of non-programmers became programmers thanks to Cobol.

I think we're seeing this effect with AI code copilots, as well. It can't replace a programmer, but it can elevate a potential programmer to proficient (in at least some tasks) faster than was possible before.

I know it theoretically means I earn less than I might have, but for my whole career there's been so much more to be done than there are of us to do it, anyway.

Everything that comes later, less so.

Yeah. They really need to get off my lawn with this nonsense. We've seen this enough times to know that it'll be great, but still won't solve all our problems.

But/and also also, just because you might know what a multiplication is you still might not know how to use that to make audio louder! (You might say "well just add to the loudness!" or if you actually know it's not that easy you might say "just multiply it by 2!", but the computer doesn't simply take "audio" it takes some form of bytes in an array encoding said audio, let's say PCM to make it easier, and you still need to know how to loop over that and multiply every value by 2 to double the physical volume.)