Cobol Isn't Dead 41
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!"
yeah right! (Score:1)
*sigh... life's tough
Make a request. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Make a request. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
COBOL is still a pain to read and even more of a pain to write. After taking 2 COBOL courses in college, I never *EVER* want to deal with it again.
The Wow Community (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Wow Community (Score:3, Informative)
That would be ADD 1 TO i in COBOL
Yes, I am a COBOL programmer and I had no problem comprehending the script linked to in the grandparent.
Re:The Wow Community (Score:2)
Re:The Wow Community (Score:1)
in all fairness, that probably wasn't nearly so obvious to people back than (what was it, forty or fifty years ago now?) as it is to us today. the sample she had to judge from was machine code, probably assembly, maybe FORTRAN, and not a whole lot else, after all.
even so, the more i learn about COBO
Re:The Wow Community (Score:2)
And, come to think of it, Hopper was one of those bureaucrat
Re:The Wow Community (Score:1)
Well, there's always the COMPUTE statement, COMPUTE i = i + 1. You can use it to compute any algerbraic expression.
However, using the COBOL keywords for the arithmetic expressions can give you greater control. The DIVIDE statement is quite funky in COBOL. You can do your division, get the integer result, the remainder and handle a divide by zero condition all in one statement.
There are a few other COBOL keywords and statements that allow you to do
Re:The Wow Community (Score:1)
Re:The Wow Community (Score:3, Interesting)
But boy would it be a royal pain to write!
Encoding the message in that bizarre way made my eyes ache. I suppose you could, irony of ironies, use a Perl program to generate it automatically
D
One active site (Score:5, Funny)
Not after today there isn't
Lol, that's rich. (Score:3, Interesting)
Although, as more people start to fall from the ranks of "knowing" COBOL the remaining few that can service the large amount of systems out there should do really well financially.
I have an old COBOL compiler for an ancient version of Xenix (2.3.4 I think) on 5.25" Floppies! I may dust it off and take a look for fun at some of the old code I've got laying around.
COBOL programming is like these old guys I worked with that hang their hat on DOS programming in Clipper, sad. What was impressive in 1993, is no longer impressive.
Re:Lol, that's rich. (Score:1)
yes and no, actually- a good portion of the COBOL based systems out there right now are in the financial industry, which is not known for paying IT people well
There's actually currently quite a few younger (ie 20's and 30's) people working on cobol systems now, so they'll have fresh bodies for a while.
Re:Lol, that's rich. (Score:2)
Speak for yourself - I work in the finance industry as a coder and it pays pretty damn well. Not, I hasten to add, that I'd touch COBOL for all the Mountain Dew in America.
COBOL for business logic != COBOL for presentation (Score:2, Interesting)
Cobol isn't dead. . . (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cobol isn't dead. . . (Score:2)
*rimshot*
Re:Cobol isn't dead. . . (Score:1)
It's pining for the fiords. Lovely bird, COBOL. Beautiful plumage.
It is about time for Cobol to make a come back. (Score:1)
Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol (Score:1)
Re:Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol (Score:1)
I believe that Micro Focus [microfocus.com] makes COBOL environments for either client/server or .NET and Acucorp [acucorp.com] also makes a PC based COBOL environment.
Re:Lawson's ERP runs on Cobol (Score:2)
So does PeopleSoft and lots of other 'Enterprise' systems. I seem to recall an article in one of those 'IT newspapers' a year or so back that said that 75% of the business logic in programs world wide is written in Cobol. Cobol programmers aren't going anywhere.
...and neither is my gramps (Score:1)
Been there... (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
still awaiting... (Score:1)
Re:still awaiting... (Score:3, Informative)
even Eclipse IDE (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.eclipse.org/cobol/ [eclipse.org]
If you want it, go fetch it, its open source.
Fh
Its not dead, (Score:1)