Comments on: Happy Birthday Cobol

By: Brian X

Brian X — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:01:17 +0000

Oh, and I’m not sure I’d call it “using” Cobol as such. When you talk about using Linux, it’s as an operational framework for other things you do. The closest you can come to saying that someone using a program written in Cobol is “using” Cobol is that the program will generally be linked against a standard runtime package; it might be a bit more accurate to say that about, say, Perl, but even then the process will usually be transparent to the end-user unless the end-user is the one writing the program. But otherwise it’s sort of like saying that someone who lives in a house is using a hammer that helped build it.

By: Brian X

Brian X — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:54:15 +0000

Around where I went to school, learning Cobol was something of a badge of shame — the one classmate who openly admitted to it was teased about it occasionally. I assume he cleaned up on Y2K though.

I’ll tell ya something, though — if Y2K taught us anything, it was that there’ll always be room for people with legacy skills. Even now, I’m sure someone out there needs someone with CP/M expertise, and you never know if someone will be crazy enough to bring back Multics.

By: reboho

reboho — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:59:49 +0000

Chances are you “use” CICS and VSAM as well. I still code COBOL for CICS and use VSAM, DB2 and the like. I actually went to a lecture by Capt. Grace Hopper at University Missouri-Rolla in the late 70’s. I remember her holding up a 11 inch wire and saying it was a nanosecond.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:33:24 +0000

Lisp and Fortran are almost as old.

By: David

David — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 10:25:05 +0000

back in grad school, I landed a part time job writing the odd program that the county’s IT people didn’t have the time for. When I interviewed for the job, they asked me if I knew the 4 divisions. I answered “long, short, fractions, and decimals” – got the gig anyways.

By: Jason Thibeault

Jason Thibeault — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 09:51:08 +0000

I have never had the inestimable pleasure of programming in COBOL. I read a printout of some COBOL source once. That’s about it. Around the time the Comp Sci majors were learning it, as their follow-up language to Smalltalk, I was an English major who started messing around with Malbolge.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 08:15:31 +0000

Kapitano: What version of basic? Not VB, I assume.

By: Alcari

Alcari — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:27:08 +0000

Happy birthday COBOL, may I never have to meet you again 😉

By: Kapitano

Kapitano — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 05:10:35 +0000

I learned COBOL in 1989, then got told it would soon be superceeded by a spiffy new language called...Ada. By '94 Ada was dead and us computer students we being told soon everything would be written in C++. I suppose C++ is the language of choice for most new software, but most software by definition is old. The last program I wrote was in BASIC - yesterday.

By: Ritchie Annand

Ritchie Annand — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 04:09:27 +0000

In light of the improvements that came from augmenting C to C++, I’m still waiting for the object-oriented extension ADD 1 TO COBOL.