COBOL Comes To Visual Studio 2015 86
New submitter dmleonard618 writes: Micro Focus isn't writing off COBOL just yet. The company is trying to win developers over with COBOL with the latest release of Visual COBOL for Visual Studio. The new solution aims to bring back the ancient language and make it relevant again. "Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2015 is the next generation of COBOL development solutions, designed for today's application developer to do just that, in a productive and cost-effective way," said Micro Focus' Ed Airey.
Re:Why not implement (Score:5, Insightful)
while there are some ancient systems still out there requesting the odd COBOL programmer
Trillions of dollars worth of code is written in COBOL. Every time you make a monetary transaction, it involves a system running COBOL.
do they actually expect COBOL to make a come-back?
Over a billion new lines of code is written in COBOL every year. It's here to stay.
Re:Why not implement (Score:5, Funny)
Over a billion new lines of code is written in COBOL every year. It's here to stay.
Of course, that billion lines is enough to add two checks together.
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And in Java you would have a billion lines of code show in the stack trace debugger for adding two checks together
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And a quintillion lines of code is written in each and every other language than COBOL every day.
Puleeze. What a load of ineptitude. "Over a billion new lines of code is written in COBOL every year."
ADD ONE TO INEPTNESS GIVING COBOL-UBER-ALLES
While COBOL is not dead, claims re: the quantity of COBOL being newly written are lies, having been a compiler engineer at Liant (LPI-Cobol && RM-Cobol).
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You're way off. By orders of magnitude. Or maybe you were being sarcastic.
Source. [microfocus.com] Apologize, anonymous one. I find your lack of faith disturbing.
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While we're at it, can you provide a source that says I need a haircut?
Preferably one that doesn't come from a barbers' association.
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People without sources to cite should find some.
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The intention was indeed what you said. It didn't work because language schmanguage, at least half the work is debugging the spec and that requires (to say the least) a peculiar mindset.
MBAs are not necessarily accountants these days (Score:3)
Remembering that COBOL was written so your average 60's MBA could write code, there's a decent chance that COBOL will come back. It's terrifying, but it's much more understandable to the finance types than more modern languages.
In recent years about one third of MBAs are scientists or engineers, including many software developers. So there is a pool of traditional (science and engineering) software developers who are financially literate enough to properly implement financial software. The "accountants" don't have to write the code themselves anymore, and neither do the "scientists" and "engineers", as in the 60s. They probably have not had to do so for many decades.
Plus there are (or were as recently as the 80s) "software deve
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Behind the times (Score:2)
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I was sort of enthusiastic, back in the day, for the 'Visual' interface in Visual Basic, in the 3.0 era. Which kind of went away. Visual C? Where do I click? heh.
What visual design elements does Visual COBOL bring? You get drag and drop Punch Keypunch Machines, Verifiers*, and a High Speed Card Reader? It would modernize and simplify COBOL coding. No risk of dropped decks! Output formatting would be in the code hidden under the Chain Printer icon.
I suspect all the code in the Visual COBOL program res
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(*the 'Verifier' was an odd beast. A big piece of equipment hulking on the floor in the same room that looked almost identical to the Keypunch machine [columbia.edu], that didn't actually punch cards. You would feed the previously-punched cards into it and pay a keypunch operator to type in the same lines of data again and all the verifier did was verify the cards had the same data as what was being typed in a second time)
Wow
Re:Behind the times (Score:5, Funny)
An old COBOL programmer that I worked with early in my career described how he got tired of the keypunch operators making mistakes entering his code, so he would do the keypunch himself.
Eventually he said that he just started programming off of the top of his head at the keypunch terminal
He ended up writing most of the programs used at the local department of transportation with little or no documentation
The director allowed it and was stuck with it when he was forced to retire by the local government HR rules
He was back at work a week later as a consultant making three times what he had been at the top of his pay grade
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But is it webscale?
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With the right paradigm it can hyperconverged to an SOA that has wearable computing gamification omnichannel crowdsoursing deep web in the globosphere. It can take a selfie with you.
OK, "wearable" handles "mobile" (even better than mobile!), and maybe "hyperconverged" and "SOA" covers "cloud"; does "crowdsourcing" cover "social", or did you miss a buzzword?
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Visual punchcard
Seek and ye shall find [x3270.bgp.nu].
MS COBOL? (Score:1)
I have a bad feeling about this.
Image and virtualize it
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No, it's not Microsoft Cobol, it's MicroFocus Cobol...from an entirely different company. MicroFocus has been making Cobol compilers for decades.
Cue the 12 yo IT "guru's" (Score:2)
To everybody who is going to be bitching about how dead COBOL is:
http://skeptics.stackexchange.... [stackexchange.com]
I'm glad I'm no longer involved with any COBOL code, but my 10+ years of COBOL programming has left me with the impression that it's not going away any time soon.
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And most old-school programmers would rather use the ISPF editor anyway. (Let me guess, there's an ISPF mode for VS2015?)
That's the thing with Visual Studio: it's great for C#, not so great for some other languages.
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Yes but personally I stopped using the 'visual' aspect of it years ago. Sure it makes for some nifty presentation videos, look you just drag one of these onto here and drag a whatsit onto that thingy and your program writes itself.... riiiight.
It's a great code editor, the 'visual' power for me is in good syntax highlighting. That is useful for most any programming or markup language.
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That's not always the case, though.....with OpenStep the GUI creator is nice, and worth using.
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That's the thing with Visual Studio: it's great for C#, not so great for some other languages.
I'm curious why you'd say that. Out of the box VS 2013 has support for at least seven or eight languages, I believe. And for any other language, all you need to do is write a plugin. For instance, I also use WIX (essentially an XML-based installer language) for writing Windows installers.
I've been using it for C++ programming before C# existed. Yes, there were a few sad years when C# was all the hotness and native languages were all but ignored, but C++ is once again a first-class citizen. I'm a videog
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I'm curious why you'd say that. Out of the box VS 2013 has support for at least seven or eight languages, I believe. And for any other language, all you need to do is write a plugin.
It's not that it's impossible, it's just not as good. C# is a first class citizen in Visual Studio, Java is a third class citizen. C++ support is fine in VS, but C is a second class citizen. Maybe 2015 is better, idk.
Same goes for Eclipse, btw....it's really nice with Java, but the C support is meh. It works, but it's not great.
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Hmm, I'll have to take your word for it, as I've only really used C++ and C# myself. For C support, is the complaint about the lack of standards compliance (which I heard improved in 2013) or the editor and tools support?
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For C support, is the complaint about the lack of standards compliance
Oh yeah, I forgot about the lack of standards compliance lol. That drove me crazy, and it is somewhat better now (but not perfect by any means. Come on, it's been 16 years since the C99 standard came out, no excuses). Mainly I was complaining that Microsoft expects you to use C++ not C. Their editor and tools are centered around that expectation.
Re:MicroFocus has been trying for decades (Score:5, Informative)
Micro Focus is playing a last man standing strategy. Their company focus is based on keeping companies on the legacy systems for as long as possible. The problem is, most companies have some sort of migration strategy in process, or at least on the pipeline, the cost of operating these legacy environments and handling business changes are started to exceed the cost of maintaining it. As security concerns, changes in business processes, customer expectations of promptness, and connectivity with newer tools become prevalent. Staying on the mainframe, and using old tools or upgraded version of such tools, with a bit of polish to make it appear more modern, is just becoming more of an effort to keep going, the it will be to start over again.
So they are in business because most of their competition changed strategies or went out of business. However dealing with them, I can tell they are feeling the pain, as they are now bossing around their customers, giving them more expensive contracts thinking that they are stuck. (I recently gave them a snub at my current employer, by replacing their tool that they though was vital to the institution, with about 500 lines of python code and 24 work hours, because they were asking too much for license fees). I really don't trust them as a company, they are rather low life.
Now they are the last man standing, in a world where they are needed less and less.
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How well GnuCOBOL compares to it?
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MicroFocus has been trying to decades to get people to use COBOL off of the mainframe, but haven't had much luck
Could it be their pricing model? I was tempted to try it some time ago, as a nostalgia kick, but found it was quite an expensive platform, which nobody is going to pick up to try out if it means they would have to take on a major mission of convincing their employer that there was a future with it, when it wasn't even possible to find out how good it was in the first place.
Really? (Score:1)
Had ex-employee leave me for six figure COBOL job (Score:1)
I had an employee who worked part time 20 hour here and 20 hours for another company leave within the past 2 years to train for a COBOL job. He's making six figures now. I think the idea that COBOL is dead is laughable. We're losing COBOL programmers left and right because they're all retiring or dying off, but COBOL is still here and is commanding a premium salary. While 10 years ago it seemed everybody was trying to jump ship the reality is it was largely an utter failure. Companies who tried largely fail
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So a business decision.
Spend a million dollars for a new system or keep 10 COBOL developers at 100k each for a year?
We are getting to a point where things are crossing over and it is getting cheaper to migrate.
Open Source Database engines, Cheap cloud computing solutions, programmings languages that allow for more rapid design... BPM, CRM, and a whole set of Alphabet soup solutions available canned to replace those custom jobs... It is a different world out there, and they are tradeoffs with some major pro
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The problem isn't the systems. It's 50 years of business logic embedded in the code that runs those systems. Half of it was never documented, because management needed it Right Now and once it was working they needed the developers on another project they also needed Right Now. Of the half that is documented, most of it has undocumented special cases in it and nobody has a clue whether they're needed anymore or not. And this is where the sticking point is, because you can't configure a canned solution to do
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Thing was, these were run on old unix mainframes that were still justifying their cost. I'm not sure the target audience with this thing though
13 Years Behind (Score:1)
Seriously, Slashdot? How is this news? There have been *multiple* COBOL implementations for Visual Studio since at least 2002. Fujitsu and MicroFocus both have implementations that are not only native but also can compile down to .NET bytecode and integrate completely with the CLR. They even have designer support for visually creating UIs and web pages.
Could you be any less relevant, Slashdot? Olds for Nerds, shit that mattered over a decade ago?
LOL (Score:1)
Year 2038 is coming (Score:2)
COBOL programmers (if there are any left by mid-2037) will probably make a lot of money for those six months.
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Y2.038 is a UNIX thing. While there are certainly COBOL programs running on UNIX, I suspect most have been ported there. How many are actually using time_t?
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It's not an ancient language (Score:1)
It's just a very very old one.
Fortran - which is still in wide use - and Plankalkül [wikipedia.org] (not so much) are older.
Fujitsu COBOL (Score:2)
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Yes Fujitsu Cobol.NET is a real product that has existed for many years and is used by many large companies:
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/... [fujitsu.com]
Beware of Slashvertisement! (Score:5, Informative)
What: Micro Focus offers a plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 that lets you "to maintain and modernize COBOL systems alongside Microsoft
When: Press Release on 2015-08-20
Who: Micro Focus has recently merged with Attachmate Group, owners of brands like Borland, NetIQ, Attachmate, Novell and SUSE
Why: COBOL is still used in a lot of legacy applications.
Visual MUMPS (Score:2)
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And brief google shows that while there's not Visual Mumps, programming Mumps using Visual Studio is definitely a thing. And much to my horror, there used to be a Visual APL. And a Visual FORTH.
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MUMPS is a bag of crap. Hogan and Pick, that's where it's at.
Lisp? (Score:1)
Maybe Visual Lisp will be next... oh, wait: http://autode.sk/1PsAwTO [autode.sk]
FWIW... (Score:1)
The company I'm currently consulting for handles 10s of millions of credit card transactions using a COBOL-based system. Their "new" system is legacy "C".
Part of my job was to figure out the bit-twidling they were doing to handle the EMV (Europay-Mastercard-Visa) data from chip-based credit cards. It was ugly.
MOVE (Score:2)
Isn't Cobol the only language where MOVE really means "copy"?
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Visual Cobol... AKA... (Score:2)
Visual Cobol... AKA Microsoft Word.
Not as bizarre as it sounds (Score:1)
As I think most of us know, there's a huge amount of legacy COBOL code out there, still grinding away in banks and insurance companies and such. As a percentage of total production code it may be declining dramatically, but as an absolute number the decline is much smaller. It's a lot easier to say you're going to rewrite an undocumented COBOL monstrosity in Java than to actually do it.
If COBOL on Visual Studio has the tedious bits defaulted and hidden, or shrunk to something just as informative but not
COBOL... (Score:1)
Grace (Score:2)
I, I still, I ...
I love you Grace.
Object-oriented COBOL? (Score:1)
MF Cobol in VStudio not new (Score:2)