I recently re-watched "The Lord of the Rings" (LOTR) movie trilogy. Remember the LOTR phrase, "One Ring To Rule Them All"?  Could there ever be "One Programming Language To Rule Them All" (OPLTRTA)?  In the early years of our industry there were loads of new languages appearing each year (History of Programming Languages).  There were also attempts to create best of all worlds programming languages.  PL/I was an attempt to take parts of ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, and added numerous data types, dynam...

From News of the Weird: Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and ordered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget. However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang pointed out that state payroll records could not be changed to accommodate the cut because they were written in the antiquated COBOL computer lan...