Cobol Isn't Dead

YellowYahoo writes "Ever wondered how to combine old and new technology for fun and profit? Doing their part to continue COBOL's dominance of installed software, Deskware has developed a COBOL based scripting language designed for serving web pages. Whether or not COBOL will succeed as the next great web language, is obvously up to some debate, but there is at least one active site deployed in Cobolscript. According to their FAQ, their main advantage is leveraging existing employees' programming knowledge. Does that make it a reasonable language to use? There's certainly some justification that COBOL makes a better langauge for implementing business rules than either Perl or Java. Time to dust off (or start learning?) all those older languages!"

Re:Wow

[Alrescha]

I don't know why the original post was modded 'insightful', did anyone actually look at that code? I did, and it was easy to determine what the program was supposed to do. I suspect it was understandable to most readers of Slashdot.

Perl is the very definition of obfuscated. If you code in Perl while drinking, even you can't understand what the program does the next morning. It's powerful, but people don't refer to it as a write-only language for nothing.

A.

Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol

[hobbestcat]

Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol... on top of Oracle DB... with a JavaScript UI engine. Really! I'm not kidding. We are deploying it right now and (as an IT Architect) I must say that I was stunned by their architecture.

Been there...

[pamar]

... done that, etc.

I've worked from 1988 to 1997, more or less, in large projects using varuious mixture of COBOL, C and so called 4GLs (Oracle).

Main "advantage" of COBOL should be that if you restrict usage to a given subset of the language you may have mediocre coders *and* a relatively low defect count.

Not much else to recommend it for, though.

The idea of using it for HTML generation is pretty ridicolous, because, at least in my experience, using COBOL doesn't really help you keeping a flexible mind about different "paradigms" and having to suddenly reason in terms of page requests, caching, static vs. dynamic etc. would probably be a little overwhelming for the skillset of the "existing workforce who already knows the language".

The Wow Community

[fm6]

To a COBOL person, that probably looks as clear as i++;. Which brings up a point people always overlook when they argue about whether one programming language is "better" than another.

People think of programming language in terms of language specs and compilers or interpreters. But those things don't define a language -- they just describe and implement it. A programming language is defined by the community of programmers that use it. As long as that community persists, so will the programming language. It should come as no suprise that Cobol people find it easier to invent a Cobol-like script language than to switch to a totally new form of coding. Just as scientists and engineers (the original kind, not the software kind) insist on using Fortran, an ancient language that's a nightmare to compile and debug.

Come to think of it, programming languages are not different in this respect from ordinary human language. Which people are always trying to "fix" but which remains stubbornly illogical and inefficient. Consider Han Characters [de-han.org], the oldest and most absurdly complex writing system on the planet. Yet it's a primary communication tool for 1/3 of the human race, and will certainly remain so as long as human literacy persists.