Join COBOL's Next Generation

jfruh writes "COBOL, it's finally becoming clear, isn't going away any time soon; there are far too many business-criticial applications written in it that work perfectly well for that to happen. This reality could be a career boon for IT staff. Need to learn the ins and outs of COBOL? Your employer may well pay for your training. Just getting started in IT? COBOL can provide a niche that gets you a first job."

COBOL Lives!

[LeepII]

I took COBOL in the 80's, my instructor was one of the guys that MADE COBOL. He said even back then, COBOL will not be going anywhere for decades. Man did he call it.

Re:Nothing does

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean solving business-related information technology problems in a concise and maintainable way, I think you're very, very wrong. COBOL is a horrible, wordy language. If you mean wearing out developer's keyboards, you are more correct. COBOL is too verbose to be easily legible. I'm of the opinion that there is an ideal level of information density when it comes to conveying the intent of a piece of software. At one end is assembly, and at the other is COBOL. neither are good. C approaches it from one end and probably something like Python from the other. Both are for more usable, maintable, and flexible languages.

I'm of the opinion that if you enjoy writing code in COBOL you either haven't used anything else or you're a masochist.

COBOL is a domain specific language. You're a masochist and a fucking idiot if you use COBOL to design an operating system, or a control system for a nuclear plant. COBOL is designed from the start for business applications. And that's what it's good at. The syntax is what it is, but 100 times better to design business programs in COBOL than in fucking JAVA. There's a reason why languages come and go but FORTRAN and COBOL are still there. Think about it.

Re:Nothing does

[Anonymous Coward]

Programs should be readable and understandable by humans. In the end it's humans that maintain software, not the computer. Computers only have to execute code, but we, we have to read code. So a verbose language that conveys all the information explicitely is much better than C or C++ where you're almost constrained to obfuscate by default. That's the nature of those languages. So yes in an e-peen contest, C or C++ may win over COBOL; but start maintaining large software and clarity is paramount. C or C++ programmers wouldn't even recognise that word (clarity).

Again?

[Antipater]

An identical story was posted back in February [slashdot.org]. By the same user, no less. So, Mr. Josh Fruhlinger, how much does Eric Bloom pay you to Slashvertise for him?

Re:Nothing does

[AlphaFreak]

Record (file) handling. To process a record-composed file in C you have to write a lot of boilerplate code (just parsing the records into its components and re-creating the records by parts) requires probably to write a specific function to do that. In COBOL you just declare the structure mapping the physical record and you are done.

By the way, the languge has all the control structures needed to write decent code since COBOL-81. Before that (COBOL-74) it was a really ugly mess, but the modern COBOL (yes, it has been updated a lot of times) allows to write clean and understandadble code.