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RE: A Recollection
by cciulla (Friar) on May 09, 2000 at 01:04 UTC
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CODASYL (Conference on Data Systems Languages) created COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) so that non-technical managers could read code. In that respect, COBOL was a big win.
Yeah, it's wordy ("Copy Of BASIC Only Longer"), but there's still a use for it. Same with RPG, Assembler, FORTRAN, etc.
Of course, as a scripting language, COBOL probably wouldn't cut it.
DISPLAY "JUST ANOTHER COBOL HACKER" AT COLUMN 20 ROW 13.
Of course, in 20 or 30 years, people will probably be laughing at VB, C, Delphi, perl, Tk, linux, etc.
Just my $0.02
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RE: A Recollection
by johncoswell (Acolyte) on May 06, 2000 at 17:43 UTC
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HAHAHAHAHAHA! I love it! That's great!
I've struggled with my COBOL courses for two years
now, and, on the verge of finally finishing them off,
this just made my day. Would you mind if I
used this revelation on my COBOL/CICS Killer pages
(with a link back to wherever you like)? Thanks!
John Coswell - http://www.coswell.com
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I've "struggled" with it for two years as well. Never cared to
do my assignments, so I failed. It's not that hard in the
end. Although VSAM, OS/390, MVS, JCL and all that crap
sure confuses you. I hate COBOL. I'll never respect
it. It's so fucking weak.
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Tell that to ALL the major banks, aerospace manufacturers, hell, manufacturers of almost anything, hosptials, insurance companies,....
You get the picture. If you need to pound big numbers through databases, over and over again, and produce checks and statements for millions of people, or handle millions of part numbers in warehouses around the planet, you use COBOL, on big old mainframes.
When you want nice management reports from these processes, you use a little unix, perl, java, etc.
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John, that's cool. Use it to your heart's content! Take care!
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RE: A Recollection
by Anonymous Monk on May 05, 2000 at 21:48 UTC
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Nice one. Have you read this one... its a bit long, but stick with it. It made me smile :)
Cobol joke | [reply] |
RE: A Recollection
by toadi (Chaplain) on May 07, 2000 at 19:56 UTC
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That's not so hard. How many languages were there in the start of programming.
COBOL whas one of the easiest languages, best suited for the machines of those days. The language had some advantages in that time.
But now the time has come an let it rest the language is dead.
No OOP with COBOL. No real features you can use... It was nice but COBOL isn't that hard. The challenge in that time was to fit the program in the limited hardware.
--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right
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The language is NOT dead. Our core product is a havy-duty cobol crunching engine. It runs under Micro-Focus on a variety of unix boxes, including Linux.
We have added some Java front-ends to it, and some additional reporting and data mining capabilities. But the core is still COBOL, and will be for many many years.
What COBOL does, it does well. TMTOWTDI applies across languages and platforms.
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You are absolutely right, COBOL is not dead, and I don't see it
going away for a few years at least. And certainly, the job that
it does, it does well, but that does not mitigate the pain and
anguish that comes from having to code large COBOL systems.8^)
Whoever wants to work on COBOL is more than welcome to, I will not
question their choice, but I know that it is not for me, and I am
happier working with things like Perl. just my $0.02.
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Actually, I hate to be the one to bring this up, but there
does exist Object-Oriented Cobol. Scary but true.
Mik
who is adding nothing really useful to this conversation
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RE: A Recollection
by Novician (Novice) on May 08, 2000 at 13:46 UTC
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Its rather easy, if you do read your textbook.
I use a AS/400 server in school where i am taught.
not that difficult, but outdated it sure is now. | [reply] |
RE: A Recollection
by buzzcutbuddha (Chaplain) on May 08, 2000 at 16:35 UTC
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It is true, that at the time, COBOL served it's purpose on the big
iron, but at the same time, many schools still teach it, and coming
to that from working with Javascript, it was really really painful.
Not to mention that we had just studiedt VB before that, so we were
used to creating GUIs and having all those toys to play with, and
then to go to COBOL....ugh...luckily, my teacher had a sense of humor.
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I'm strugling with COBOL assignments today and actually checked some results with Perl. Perl was 1. easier to do.. 2. about 10 - 15 % faster...
But I can actually see the point in using COBOL. It would be far to expensive to rebuild all legacy systems in perl!
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