Personal computing discussed

Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, just brew it!

 
Igor_Kavinski
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Topic Author
Posts: 2077
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 2:34 am

Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:26 am

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... lp-states/

JBI, I bet you have some cool insight/stories to share about this.
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:39 am

I've written exactly one COBOL program in my life, and that was in the 1980s. For Y2K a lot of COBOL programmers came out of retirement to patch legacy systems; this time around that strategy won't work because most of them are dead.

Many people don't realize how much our tech infrastructure still relies on IBM mainframes running legacy COBOL code. Government, banking, insurance, and airlines still run a lot of their back-end systems on them. IBM gets a nice revenue bump every time they refresh their mainframe product line, from customers who want to upgrade these systems to more modern (but still backward-compatible) hardware.

I also just ran across this yesterday - Cloudflare has added COBOL support to their platform: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare- ... ort-cobol/

And FWIW, there's a COBOL compiler in the Ubuntu repositories... :wink:
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Igor_Kavinski
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Topic Author
Posts: 2077
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 2:34 am

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:44 am

I had Cobol in my 1st semester of CS degree (that I never got. Long story). I wrote a program that simply printed a table and updated it onscreen when I added or subtracted values from the fields. That took around 50 printed pages worth of source code. No wonder they have billions of lines of code to contend with. Cobol makes it extremely hard to write succinct programs that can accomplish even a fraction of what can be done with C or any other modern language.
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:46 am

It was one of the earliest attempts at a "high level" language, and was (rightfully) seen as a huge improvement at the time.

Tech evolves and (generally) improves. The "vi" text editor was a huge step forward in the 1970s. Now it is seen as archaic (but like COBOL, is still hanging on).
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Igor_Kavinski
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Topic Author
Posts: 2077
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 2:34 am

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 9:27 am

Do you know a successful Cobol programmer in real life?
 
Redocbew
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Posts: 2495
Joined: Sat Mar 15, 2014 11:44 am

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 11:45 am

Languages never die. They just fade from popularity. :P
Do not meddle in the affairs of archers, for they are subtle and you won't hear them coming.
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 3:52 pm

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
Do you know a successful Cobol programmer in real life?

I imagine some of the people I work with (or have worked with) did COBOL programming at some point.

In fact, there's one developer in particular that I remember (goes back quite a few years though...) who defined a whole bunch of macros to make his C code look more like COBOL. Really annoyed all the other developers who had to deal with his code. We basically told him to knock it off... OR ELSE!

Redocbew wrote:
Languages never die. They just fade from popularity. :P

People have been predicting the demise of C for a long time too, and it just keeps hanging on. In addition to being what OS kernels are still typically written in, it has moved down-stack, replacing assembly language in lightweight embedded devices.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Captain Ned
Global Moderator
Posts: 28704
Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: Vermont, USA

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 4:28 pm

JBI twigged me to this. Visual COBOL. Putting those two words into a single statement makes my brain hurt.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/produc ... l/overview
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
Redocbew
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Posts: 2495
Joined: Sat Mar 15, 2014 11:44 am

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 5:08 pm

Try Visual COBOL on Azure Now


No. I refuse. Just.... no.
Do not meddle in the affairs of archers, for they are subtle and you won't hear them coming.
 
Wirko
Gerbil Team Leader
Posts: 296
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:38 am
Location: Central Europe

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Sat Apr 18, 2020 5:13 pm

Captain Ned wrote:
JBI twigged me to this. Visual COBOL. Putting those two words into a single statement makes my brain hurt.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/produc ... l/overview


Why is that surprising? Visual Basic and Visual C++ have deep roots in the same millenium as COBOL. The page you linked is a lot funnier, though. It takes a Leonardo da Vinci to put COBOL on the same page as Docker and Azure.
 
Igor_Kavinski
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Topic Author
Posts: 2077
Joined: Fri Dec 22, 2006 2:34 am

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:05 am

Captain Ned wrote:
JBI twigged me to this. Visual COBOL. Putting those two words into a single statement makes my brain hurt.


What is your language of choice?
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Calling all dinosaurs - IBM needs you!

Mon Apr 20, 2020 9:26 am

JBI wrote:
In fact, there's one developer in particular that I remember (goes back quite a few years though...) who defined a whole bunch of macros to make his C code look more like COBOL. Really annoyed all the other developers who had to deal with his code. We basically told him to knock it off... OR ELSE!


The Bourne Shell was basically done the same way, C macros to make it look more like ALGOL. To the point where the influence leaked into the shell scripts.

This made writing bash really hard, evidently. It also supposedly inspired the International obfuscated C Code contest.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
GZIP: On