only nobody sane would want to debug a 20,000 line COBOL program that could have done the same thing in C in under 2000 lines. :) The debugging was the hard part, because they had to do a memory dump and then do some math to figure out what the values were in some cases. Almost anyone could read, write, and code COBOL code, but the few that knew how to debug it were the good ones that they kept on.

The same thing with the GUI, almost anyone can use a computer now. In the Non-GUI days (CLI, Command Line Interface), users had to remember command words and operators and pipe symbols, etc. Very few could do it, and most ran batch files or programs that someone else wrote for them. With MacOS and MS-Windows, more people got to use computers without knowing how they worked. Those that knew how they worked, debugged OS issues and created the IT/IS Departments.

Visual BASIC is the easiest language that I know of to learn besides COBOL. Basically anyone can create a VB program by dragging and dropping controls on a form. The hard part is adding the code to check those forms, and do calculations, and formulas and other stuff that the luddite programmers don't know how to do. Again, the hardest part is the debugging. But at least VB doesn't require a hex dump to debug, it can go step by step over the code and highlight the most recent code before it is executed. Which makes debugging a lot easier.

The main threat to IT is the H1B Visa Workers and IT Sweat Shops in other countries taking the IT work away from US Citizens. Nothing against those people, but they are being used by the firms to shaft the other workers. What are you going to do when you have to train an H1B worker to do your job, or they move it overseas to another IT worker?