I’m just super interested to learn about this language that is effectively never used with the huge caveat that it still underpins some of the most critical financial and government systems.
Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#2[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#3Honestly, I downloaded https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/ and read a tutorial but didn't go further.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#4Yes, somewhat for fun and somewhat for work. There are online cobol fiddle environments that can help you. Data is stored in something like a c Union on a buffer, and the programming style is pre-procedural, sort of like a very easy assembly language. The language is very wordy, and there aren't a lot of standard libraries.
It is ok for storing and updating records, but writing complex algorithms would be slow
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#5I had to learn it as part of my undergrad. It was the most unfun course of my undergrad.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#6I messed around with it, thinking it seemed interesting and could be useful to know Just-In-Case. One thing I didn't get, until I started messing with it, is that COBOL isn't a general purpose language. There's a whole category of things it just can't do, and if you ask about it you'll just be told "COBOL isn't C". There's another set of things it's really effective at, primarily transactions and large iterations.
Mess around with it if you want, sure. Just realize it's a limited language with specific use cases and you're unlikely to ever touch it outside of those, even as a hobby/"for fun".
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#7I did an internship in 2009-2010 with a company who used MicroFocus “AcuCOBOL” to modernize a green-screen automotive dealership management system into a Windows GUI.
I wouldn’t say I did it for fun, but I did do it for the learning experience. My university was very invested in COBOL, and I had classmates who got offers much larger than mine to work for various finance companies in Wisconsin, so I had already learned the basics of language.
It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.
Migrating data files to new descriptors was always a stressful time. The equivalent of a database schema change, but you had to load the old files and rewrite in the new format largely manually.
The tooling we used felt dated, but worked well enough. Better than the tools we used in school.
I always used “Murach’s Structured COBOL” [1] as my primary reference. Carried that book just about everywhere during that time.
[1]: Murach's Structured COBOL https://a.co/d/hONfFT7
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#8Assembler is more rewarding as an intellectual exercise. Unless you really want to do rote record processing, in which case knock yourself out.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#9I wouldn’t say I learned it “for fun”, but when my sister was in college (25 years ago) as a business information systems major (or something like that), she had to take a Cobol course so I learned enough of it to help her get through the class. Next semester, she told me she had to take a second Cobol class. I told her I was done with Cobol and she switched majors.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#10I had to deal with a bunch of mainframes in a previous job and tried to learn a bit of COBOL. One interesting thing I learned early on was that programs are almost never written exclusively in COBOL. The language isn't Turing complete (by design), so a significant portion of a program's logic will be captured in the JCL (Job Control Language) script that configures how the program will run and orchestrates multiple programs.