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Somewhere buried at home I have an old Cobol programming book, talking about how, as a programmer, typing was beneith you. Instead you were instructed to write neatly on cards and supply these to the typist for her to type in.

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Ouch, that hurts to read quite apart from the offensive stereotype. Barring the pervasive use of shorthand, I don't think someone writing by hand has any hope of keeping up with even a moderately skilled typist, even when writing English rather than code.

I'd like to think we've grown a lot as a culture since then. I mean, seriously, do we really want to return to a time when the ALTER verb existed? :3

Unfortunately, we're still in that time. I don't see "ALTER TABLE" go away any time soon :)

Yup. SQL is from the dark ages. No wonder people are trying to abstract it away all the time.

Just to clarify, I was kidding. I'm fairly certain the GP was referring to COBOL's "ALTER x TO PROCEED TO Y" statement.

All of you who didn't get the reference, you don't even know how lucky you are :)

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