IBM COBOL for Linux on x86

COBOL will always have a soft spot in my heart as the first programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract, artistic sense. It was the ultimate litmus test.

COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even the default. But some of these programmers (not including myself back then admittedly) just wrote code that came together beautifully like a jigsaw puzzle. I’m sure if given a C++ or other language with modern features, they could do amazing things. This was before a time when Clean Code (capitalized on purpose) and such were in the zeitgeist. I didn’t appreciate the full beauty of these modular, generalized, programs until a decade or more later.

I also didn’t realize that Z systems natively ran Linux. Must have missed that news. I suspect they’ll open source this soon - makes a lot of sense, if only for keeping consistency with their C/C++ work on Z systems. They are a big contributor to L.L.V.M in that area.

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

I can assure you that’s not correct, as I work in an enterprise that has plenty of unmaintainable COBOL still running, though they’ve supplemented it with lots of really bad .NET code more recently.

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

Sadly this is entirely untrue. What's happening in practice is they're still running COBOL and they're paying some woefully underpaid and underappreciated developers to write PHP ("Zend Core") for System-i.

This allows companies to run web applications on these aging systems.

I remember years ago there was a contest for the most error messages from the fewest lines of code from a compiler.

I believe you could get the IBM COBOL compiler to generate 600 lines of error messages if you put a single period in column 6.

Of course times have changed and I don't know how to get a punched card into a linux machine. :)

> Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours?

Very common. For example Steam for Linux only really supports Ubuntu.

In my experience, extracting stuff from debs and rpms to run on, say, Arch Linux was very easy, using debtap, rpmextract, etc.