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GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

sourceforge.net

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Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#211

Post by blippage »

I tried writing my own little accounting app in GnuCOBOL. For fun, believe it or not. It didn't take me too long to bow to the inevitable and rewrite it in Perl.

Speaking tangentially, there's a project on Sourceforge called Applewood Computers Accounting System https://sourceforge.net/projects/acas/

I had a look at it a few years ago, and decided it probably wasn't suitable for my purposes. Interestingly, I see that it was updated in June of this year. The original code stretches back decades, IIRC, and has been deployed in a commercial setting. I spoke to the author on one occasion.

I have a casual interest in retro stuff, so Cobol was kinda interesting to play with for awhile, but in the end I decided that it was hopelessly impractical.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#212

Post by galoisgirl »

tubularhells wrote: post #178
the_af wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me, I criticize from experience: I worked with COBOL, and think it's an awful, unfun language, commonly used for unfun projects. And COBOL jobs don't pay particularly well where I live, either. > In my country and in Sweden it is quite easy to get good and stable job in banking/insurance/consulting business Yes, that much is true: a stable job in banking/insurance. Mostly maintaining clunky legacy system…

The only thing in my job that I'm passionate about is my paycheck. I leave my passion for when I log off the VPN.

"Passionate" is usually BS for "has no boundaries and is willing to work overtime for free".

I love my job, and I leave work at work so it stays that way.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#213

Post by the_af »

galoisgirl wrote: post #212
tubularhells wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing in my job that I'm passionate about is my paycheck. I leave my passion for when I log off the VPN.

"Passionate" is usually BS for "has no boundaries and is willing to work overtime for free". I love my job, and I leave work at work so it stays that way.

Agreed about the general BS meaning of "passion", but in this case I meant "liking software and building things with it". People maintaining legacy corporate systems written in COBOL -- the most common usage of this language -- don't exactly belong in this category. Which, as I said before, is perfectly fine: not everyone has to like software, maybe a job is just a job and you just need the paycheck. But all those recurrent articles praising COBOL somehow manage to forget this...

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#214

Post by benibela »

908B64B197 wrote: post #183
ta988 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and that's always the discussion when people from US come in to visit to the french part of companies. "Hey we heard that you are paid 5 to 10 times less than us, why do you accept that?"

Why do you?

Europe has lower rent, health care insurance, and more vacations

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#215

Post by zozbot234 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #176
dragonwriter wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lots of it. Well, the hardware that COBOL usually runs on is good for that, sure. And its usually (now) running legacy systems that no one wants the risk of reimplementing from the ground up. But is the language itself particularly well-suited to the task? I think that’s less clear. Certainly, I’ve never seen a coherent argument about how th…

One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this. Having a decimal fixed point type makes monetary calculations easier to do more reliably.

I can see a case for decimal floating point types, but fixed point adds nothing beyond what can be performed directly via arithmetic on the underlying integers. It's basically a convenience feature.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#216

Post by ithkuil »

ta988 wrote: post #180
fiftyacorn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The importance of the comments in COBOL reminds me of a developer I worked with who was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code' The other developers then spent time readding the comments

I hope you removed that dev to tidy up the team.

I did see codebases with tons of comments saying the wrong thing. Comments (prose) are not compiled and executed and tested and can easily drift

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#217

Post by Viliam1234 »

Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #173
fiftyacorn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The importance of the comments in COBOL reminds me of a developer I worked with who was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code' The other developers then spent time readding the comments

> was famous for removing comments to 'tidy up the code'. The other developers then spent time readding the comments "good stable and low-stress jobs in the middle-range of local income"

Yep. In high-stress jobs you sometimes meet an asshole who removes the comments, but no one has time to re-add them.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#218

Post by Viliam1234 »

kps wrote: post #68
the_af wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hatred comes from people like me, who have worked with COBOL and will tell you it's terribly frustrating to work with, needlessly verbose in multiple places where it doesn't need to be, and often used in banks for purposes which are the death of all you hold dear or interesting to work with. COBOL is not an interesting programming language these days, and you should not learn it unless you need it for your curren…

> It doesn't work for non-programmers. It wasn't designed to work , it was designed to please senior management. Grace Hopper: “I used to be a mathematics professor. At that time I found there were a certain number of students who could not learn mathematics. I then was charged with the job of making it easy for businessmen to use our computers. I found it was not a question of whether they could learn mathematics or…

> Throw those symbols out — I do not know what they mean, I have not time to learn symbols.

Wouldn't it be easier to just use C/C++, and define macros like "PLUS" that explands to "+", "MINUS" that expands to "-", "BECOMES" that expands to "=", etc.?

Oops, COBOL predates C. :(

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#219

Post by Viliam1234 »

mywittyname wrote: post #162
emidln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they paid well enough, your average working programmer would flip to COBOL for a pay raise. Once you've learned a few languages, you can solve problems in any language. It's just about having the manual and maybe an overview of available facilities so you don't have to read all the docs upfront. The syntax doesn't matter for data plumbing applications. COBOL is as good as BASIC as good as Java as good as Python et…

I'd happily take a COBOL job for $250k + benefits and a 3% annual raise. That's hardly a crazy salary either. It's still a substantial discount over what a lot of technology companies pay, and likely inline with what most mid-level managers at banks and insurance companies earn already. But COBOL jobs don't pay anywhere near that kind of coin, and they likely never will in my lifetime. The systems in place are solid…

Same here. Working with a crappier language in return for retiring earlier is an acceptable trade off for me. Even if after a decade of working in COBOL I became unable to find another IT job, I wouldn't care, because I'd be already happily early retired.

Out of curiosity I just made a short search for COBOL jobs in my area. The few I found actually pay less than my current Java job.

Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1

#220

Post by randmeerkat »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #203
randmeerkat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these jobs train you in on COBOL, or do you have to be an expert in it already? If you have to be an expert already how are people learning COBOL / preparing for the interview to get this kind of job?

If you're experienced in another language, you can learn COBOL in a week or two. My first job out of school was with a consulting firm that would take new-hire non-programmers and have them on a client site writing COBOL in 3-4 weeks.

That’s fast. Aside from the common complaints people have about legacy code and so on, what was the hardest part of ramping up in COBOL?
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