100 Years of Grace Hopper

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."

Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed

[davidwr]

Seriously. Learn some legacy skills, you'll need them to help your future employer maintain their legacy stuff or migrate it.

COBOL programmers are retiring fast, in 5-10 years expect a mini-boom for this skill set as those who didn't migrate before Y2K decide it's finally time.

"amazing grace" indeed

[deitrahs]

one of the few things i have on my "i love me wall" is one of her nanoseconds, framed with a letter from the admiral to my mother (whom she was trying to encourage into a career in computer science). now that i have a daughter of my own, who is already quite geeky herself, i counterbalance the pop culture effect with stories about women like grace hopper.

more girls - and hell, more boys for that matter - need to learn about people like her.

Re:Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed

[novus ordo]

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."

-Edsger W.Dijkstra

(when you mentioned 5-10 I just couldn't resist :)

Re:Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed

[Cyberax]

I helped to maintain COBOL software.

Yes, it works. And yes, it works because nobody dares to touch it. Besides, people who praise COBOL often forget that only a small fraction of COBOL code has survived. Most of the bad code has been replaced by code in another languages long ago.

There are far better tools now: Java/C# for business logic, BPEL for orchestration, rule engines, SQL stored procedures to work with large amounts of data, etc.

Re:Women

[Tablizer]

It figures. One of the wordiest (is that a word?) programming languages was invented by a woman. Talk talk talk. :-)

Men have Perl: a series of unintelligable grunts.