Show HN: Otterkit – COBOL compiler for .NET

Post by qbasic_forever » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:57 AM UTC

KTSnowy wrote: post #10

qbasic_forever wrote: post #6

Who do you expect to use this? As I understand it most COBOL use is on legacy mainframes that definitely aren't going to also be running .NET anytime soon. When a company is hiring a COBOL programmer they aren't hiring someone to just sling code--anyone can learn the language--they're hiring someone who can parachute into decades old legacy systems with zero documentation, archaic and non-existent media (tape drives)…

Given the amount of proprietary and paid-to-use COBOL compilers which run on .NET and the JVM, I would say that you're not correct. It does in fact run on .NET already. The fact that there is a COBOL 2022 standard (yes, it's still being maintained) should have given enough of a clue that COBOL doesn't run only on legacy mainframes and tape drives anymore. Sure, there are still companies using COBOL 85, but that's not…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:02 AM UTC

KTSnowy wrote: post #7

eckza wrote: post #4

I'm fascinated with this. What's your use case, here? What problems do you expect to solve for someone that chose to adopt this? Are y'all scratching a very particular itch, and open-sourcing the outcome? Or is this more of an academic / POC thing, to see what it looks like to build a COBOL to dotnet transpiler?

I find COBOL to be a very interesting language, with a huge unexplored potential. For example, I'm sure that most people are not aware that COBOL has generics, method overloading, declarative error/exception handling, asynchronous messaging, etc. This stuff is usually not taught by the current COBOL vendors. It's also very unfortunate that most compilers are closed source and quite expensive to use. We're making a fr…

Post by derefr » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:09 AM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #8

qbasic_forever wrote: post #6

Who do you expect to use this? As I understand it most COBOL use is on legacy mainframes that definitely aren't going to also be running .NET anytime soon. When a company is hiring a COBOL programmer they aren't hiring someone to just sling code--anyone can learn the language--they're hiring someone who can parachute into decades old legacy systems with zero documentation, archaic and non-existent media (tape drives)…

Modernization projects move COBOL code running on mainframes to COBOL code running on the jvm or .net, on x86 machines, using all kinds of libraries emulating services provided by the mainframe OS/environment. It's pretty amazing really.

Post by KTSnowy » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:27 AM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #9

This is cool. Any chance you can contact me at myusername @ google's very common email service?

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:48 AM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #16

So glad they remembered to support these widely known trademarks: “FLOW-MATIC® (trademark of Sperry Rand Corporation), Programming for the 'UNIVAC® I and II”. My friends and I in /r/univac can’t stand it when the trademarks are dissed. One the mods banned a guy for using Eniac instead of ENIAC and we all thought the 18-month ban was way too light, but the new guard just doesn’t care like we do. Seriously I upvoted an…