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Micro web-framework for COBOL

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Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#21

Post by blunte »

t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

And yet, if you didn't mind that kind of work, you could have been making a fortune from 1999 to now. You'll be retired before COBOL is no longer used.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#22

Post by krylon »

I once had the pleasure to meet a young person (~30 years old at the time) who had learned to program at a bank, so I had to ask her about COBOL.

Her reply was interesting, if I looked at it as a general-purpose language like C++/C#/Java, then, yes, it sucks really hard. But if you look at COBOL as a DSL for building specific business applications, it does not look all that bad.

Having never used COBOL beyond a simple HELLO-WORLD, I am not sure I can judge it either way. But her reply sounded surprisingly pragmatic to me.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#24

Post by crystalPalace »

blunte wrote: post #21
t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

And yet, if you didn't mind that kind of work, you could have been making a fortune from 1999 to now. You'll be retired before COBOL is no longer used.

There is a large market for maintaining legacy COBOL, SNOBOL, and various esoteric assembly codebases. Additionally APL and its derivatives are not entirely dead.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#25

Post by greenshackle2 »

t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

There was once a programmer who wrote software for personal computers. "Look at how well off I am here," he said to a mainframe programmer who came to visit. "I have my own operating system and file storage device. I do not have to share my resources with anyone. The software is self-consistent and easy-to-use. Why do you not quit your present job and join me here?"

The mainframe programmer then began to describe his system to his friend, saying, "The mainframe sits like an ancient Sage meditating in the midst of the Data Center. Its disk drives lie end-to- end like a great ocean of machinery. The software is as multifaceted as a diamond, and as convoluted as a primeval jungle. The programs, each unique, move through the system like a swift-flowing river. That is why I am happy where I am."

The personal computer programmer, upon hearing this, fell silent. But the two programmers remained friends until the end of their days.

The Tao of Programming, 8.3 http://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#26

Post by protomyth »

t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

In the late 80's, my academic advisor said he wouldn't sign off on me taking a COBOL class because that was a business department IT class and would not go with the rest of my studies[1]. I wasn't really into the idea anyway and filled my schedule with other classes. I do wonder what other CompSci departments at the time were doing.

1) EE was the sole teacher of FORTRAN and I decided against that also, more from a teacher problem than a lack of desire to learn FORTRAN which I later did (without the all caps).

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#27

Post by protomyth »

crystalPalace wrote: post #24
blunte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, if you didn't mind that kind of work, you could have been making a fortune from 1999 to now. You'll be retired before COBOL is no longer used.

There is a large market for maintaining legacy COBOL, SNOBOL, and various esoteric assembly codebases. Additionally APL and its derivatives are not entirely dead.

SNOBOL should be looked at, if for nothing else, for its string handling (add a brief look at Icon right afterwards). I would have killed to take APL in college, but despite having to program on an IBM 370 mainframe, no classes were offered. I'm still a little ticked.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#28

Post by mikestew »

t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

And depending on when your brother-in-law made the statement, he stood just as much of a chance or greater of being right than you did. COBOL will always be around (those 80 billion lines of code don't maintain themselves), but microprocessor and PCs could have broken any number of ways. Granted, a good knowledge of C and Unix will go a long way and be applicable to whatever ends up "winning", but it was no guarantee to the exact language and OS that would keep one employed.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#29

Post by mikestew »

krylon wrote: post #22

I once had the pleasure to meet a young person (~30 years old at the time) who had learned to program at a bank, so I had to ask her about COBOL. Her reply was interesting, if I looked at it as a general-purpose language like C++/C#/Java, then, yes, it sucks really hard. But if you look at COBOL as a DSL for building specific business applications, it does not look all that bad. Having never used COBOL beyond a simpl…

if I looked at it as a general-purpose language like C++/C#/Java, then, yes, it sucks really hard.

Plenty of people get by swinging a hammer all day and not a Swiss army knife. COBOL is one person's hammer. For me, at one point, it was RPG. You think COBOL is "domain specific"? RPG has the DSL right in the name: "Report Program Generator". Yuppers, RPG is a report writer. And when you're writing banking software or the like, which is just inputs munged into outputs, RPG did the job. Why use a language with shitty, dangerous string handling, no syntactic sugar for the task at hand, whose output keyword consists of "printf", dragging along a runtime with crap I'll never use, and other "general purpose" language problems when you can use a language crafted specifically for what you're trying to do?

I made plenty of money back in the day writing FoxPro. FoxPro sucks for embedded systems and writing an operating system. But ya know what it doesn't suck at? Taking some data, transforming it, do a little munging, and print some output. Which was precisely what customers were paying me to do at the time, and not writing a Windows competitor.

Re: Micro web-framework for COBOL

#30

Post by tambourine_man »

mikestew wrote: post #28
t1m wrote: post #17

I remember showing my "systems analyst" brother-in-law my second year university schedule when I was planning which courses I would take that fall. "You don't have any Cobol, PL/1, OS360 Assembly Language or APL on here", he observed. "I am going to focus on C, Unix and operating systems. I want to write compilers for microprocessor based computers". When he finished laughing, he called me "unemployable" and said, "m…

And depending on when your brother-in-law made the statement, he stood just as much of a chance or greater of being right than you did. COBOL will always be around (those 80 billion lines of code don't maintain themselves), but microprocessor and PCs could have broken any number of ways. Granted, a good knowledge of C and Unix will go a long way and be applicable to whatever ends up "winning", but it was no guarantee…

> those 80 billion lines of code don't maintain themselves

They kind of do sometimes. I know a guy who makes part of his living maintaining the emulation system that runs COBOL.

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