100 Years of Grace Hopper 184
theodp writes "Grab your COBOL Coding Forms and head on over to comp.lang.cobol, kids! Yesterday was Grace Hopper's 100th birthday, and many are still singing the praises of her Common Business-Oriented Language."
More than COBOL, she coined the term Bug (Score:2, Interesting)
Look at the bottom of this page. [navy.mil]
Transcending the Matrix (Score:4, Interesting)
Practically all of COBOL was replaced by the printf() command. Which is still the ultimate target for most programs written today, even if the printf() is wrapped in some higher level output function. I'm looking forward to all of all database and relations someday residing in a single invocation with a comprehensive, yet simple interface. Probably a flowchart.
It is very tough to find good COBOL people now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, there are still COBOL jobs advertised, and they largely go unfilled. It could have something to do with the fact that there are so few people remaining with the skills, and something to do with the fact that many of them are with banks who are notoriously cheap on IT salaries. The few remaining good COBOL people on the market go into contract positions that usually begin at about $70/hour. I kid you not.
It's a lot of typing, writing COBOL, and the code is at times boringly simple, but if someone is out of work and seriously looking for an IT position, learning it would not hurt. I predict there will still be some call for it 20 years from now.
right idea, but outdated implementation (Score:3, Interesting)
The best designed language overall is probably still Smalltalk: it's easy to read, easy to learn, and was designed from the ground up with the idea of being used in an interactive programming environment. It also strikes a better balance between verbosity and expressiveness. Just about the only thing that Smalltalk got wrong was to use strict left-to-right evaluation for arithmetic expressions; a better compromise might have been simply to require arithmetic expressions to be fully parenthesized.
COBOL, LISP, FORTRAN (Score:4, Interesting)
That's ADMIRAL Grace Hopper to you... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.hopper.navy.mil/Page.htm [navy.mil]
Ben
Re:Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed (Score:4, Interesting)
After working at a shop that wrote COBOL compilers for machine translation into C, I can tell you can it is interesting work, but by no means simple. What a lot of people misunderstand is that COBOL can react slightly differently under each IBM OS that was shipped. Writing a lexer/parser is easy, but the memory mapping and statement convolutions in COBOL were down-to-the-bit tricky.
COBOL was a huge exercise in data massaging, where hundreds of lines were used to map data into a structure which then fed a series of output channels, like a printer, screenmaps or files. Throw in a simple set of arithmetic, but apply it in hacker-esque ways to date bits, for example, and you're scratching your head a lot of the time.
I've read all the bashing here, but one must understand that COBOL's perspective of the world was far narrower than today's. Business data was a simple number-crunching exercise, not much further than the trajectory calculations of the earliest digital computers. I have some one of IBM's computer catalogs from 1971, a longwinded tome filled with secretary-models, low-level circuit specifications, and giant machines that would make a great B-movie these days.
Re:Transcending the Matrix (Score:3, Interesting)
I learned COBOL a quarter century ago, when there were still punchcards (mainly punched tape, but still plenty of cards). printf() mirrors the punchcards. And C++ and Perl, for example, are highlevel languages that still use the grid.
A truly highlevel language would present APIs independent of the underlying HW artifacts. Not just present a portable union of many common HW artifacts.
I've written highlevel (and lowlevel) languages. I've programmed assembly code, even in hex machine language (handcompiled on graph paper), starting in the 1970s. All the way up to 4GL IVR menuing. And plenty of - way too much - COBOL. COBOL looks archaic, though we don't notice its legacy in printf(). I'm looking forward to the same convenient nostalgia for databases down the road, because lots of DB programming and DBA reminds me of the slavery to the machine that COBOL required.
If you want to be stuck in the 1970s, you're welcome to it. Give my regards to the 8-track cassette of The Wiz.
Admiral Nanosecond (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, for a 3GHz CPU (.33 nanoseconds per clock cycle), electricity can only travel 10cm in one clock cycle. It's amazing that CPUs can do complex arithmetic when electrical signals inside the chip can only travel 10cm in that amount of time. Wonder why the CPU stalls when there's an access to main memory? Just look at your motherboard and gauge how far your memory is from the CPU, distance alone explains 4-5 clock cycles of the total delay.
Re:"amazing grace" indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you, Admiral Grace.
Met her 20 or so years ago - remember it well (Score:4, Interesting)
She did NOT create COBOL (Score:3, Interesting)
COBOL's best feature (Score:2, Interesting)
No matter the order, just shovel the coal. Quite useful in its day.
Re:Transcending the Matrix (Score:2, Interesting)
>
> $x =~ s/y/z/g;
While I have to congratulate you for showing the old dog how it is done today, i feel a little nervous. In the olden days, folks at least talked to the machine in something resembling natural language. And now? We say "Dollar ex equal wiggle ess slash why slash zed slash gee semi-fucking-colon". Is that progress?
Re:Women (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to live in the same apartment complex as her in Pentagon City. The owner built a small park in her honor, but the memorial plaque does not mention COBOL or bugs. I suppose out heroes cannot be perfect.
Re:Women (Score:3, Interesting)
I was lucky in school to meet Captain Hopper (Captain Cobol - she was promoted many times later.). In 1979 Captain Hopper visited my university, then ETSU and now TAMU Commerce, bringing her loop of microsecond wire. The computer club that night had a drink session for my one and only time as bartender and I served Ms Hopper a drink. Also there was Gary Shelley of "Structured Cobol" fame.
I am sure this story of Grace Hopper has been repeated across the USA in numerous colleges and universities in the years before, during, and after. Grace Hopper was a tireless and wonderful advocate for COBOL.
God bless her soul,
Jim Burke
PS There were other Cobol promoters out there such as Gerald Weinberg. As far as I know Gerald Weinberg mostly visited corporations with the message.