I read 'Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)' and the whole time I kept thinking that learning one of these old languages could be fun and would be a good side project. Would definitely be a lot of good projects to work on if you looked for them as paid gigs.
Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#13reading frequently on HN how COBOL is still running critical tasks, I would rather say "for fun and profit"
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#14I took a course in my undergrad for fun. It's an interesting design paradigm, all the code had a built in schema attached to it, if I recall correctly, which I've come to appreciate and find more interesting over time.
Using the AS400 was very interesting as well.
The problem about COBOL, for me, is it's so specifically designed to fill a niche of business record processing, that I'd never use it for a side project. It's too verbose, and too restricting.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#15Like with most languages, learning the language is easy. Learning all the libraries, especially the undocumented proprietary ones, is the hard part.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#16I 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 learne…
> 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”.
I think this is an often under-appreciated point -- languages don't live in isolation, but within a wider context of libraries, people using the language, and institutions and jobs with jobs that use the language.
As another example on this point -- at my current job, for some reason much of the backend has been written in Haskell. Haskell's a fine language, I actually really like many aspects of it. Our main product, however, is web based, a domain Haskell is completely able to handle on a technical level. In practice, though, it's a poor fit, and I find myself constantly puzzling at all the odd, non-idiomatic ways web architecture has been set up, often in ways that make it very difficult to make things work well for the web. In many cases, this has been carried over into some questionable typescript as the backend programmers then had to also try and become frontend programmers.
None of these problems are because of Haskell the language or because the original programmers were bad programmers, but because their background, and the majority of the Haskell ecosystem, just isn't really web-focused, and so conventions and assumptions most people who work mainly on the web take for granted they were unaware of or got wrong.
A language is more than just syntax and standard library, it's part of a broader culture.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#17I've actually seen some of the COBOL that underpins these financial entities. Typically the code base and writing style has morphed into a number of nearly incompatible dialects over the decades it has ran at these places. I've never really learned enough about it to understand copybooks and the other functions/file types it has.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#18I had to learn it as part of my undergrad. It was the most unfun course of my undergrad.
This was exactly my experience.
I then got a short contracting gig when I needed some cash. It was good money - and I never wanted to do that kind of work again. The language has any number of deficiencies, that have been fixed by later languages. And as another commenter mentioned - the departments that use it have any number deficiencies, many of them political, that got them into this position.
It is not something I would recommend for fun.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#19I 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. Me…
Ya, transactional processing of what I would consider simple and well defined data it's what typically occurs with cobol at financial institutions. In this context the code has been around forever and all the 'Oops we lost your money' bugs have generally been purged from it'.
Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
#20I 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 learne…
>I did an internship in 2009-2020
At eleven years, that sounds more like an apprenticeship than an internship.