Do you have a source for that? I'd like to show it to some mainframe fanboys at work that praise that abomination
That’s the worst mistake we made was JCL.
Yeah. Well the existence of JCL was a mistake. Building it on a card format was a mistake. Building it on assembly language was a mistake. Thinking of it as only six little control cards instead of a language was a mistake so it had no proper sub-routine facilities, no proper branching facilities.
It kind of grew. It kind of grew but when you end up with your data definitions doing all the verbiage things because you’ve limited yourself to six verbs that’s a language mistake.
We didn’t see it as a language was the fundamental problem. We saw it as a set of control cards.
And lo and behold they’re still around, the dusty decks that nobody dare touch because they run and nobody knows what’s inside
Incredibly complicated, the keyword parameters and the set goes on and on and on and on ...
[1] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
It sounds more like they are saying it’s a nightmare for the creators of the language to maintain.
Any language that allows its users to do that to themselves is a very bad language. Good languages encourage good practices.