Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

To me, there’s an ecosystem and a culture for a language in a situation.

The ecosystem is the tooling around the language. Debugging, performance profiling, building and dependency management are examples.

The culture is how the language is used in real life. How stable is the ecosystem?

There are lots of beautiful languages that are used horrifically. Enterprise OOP is an example for me where more than half the code is dedicated to avoiding basic principles for “what if we want to change later” (looking at you getters and setters).

And within a company or software suite, there can be subcultures of how “we” use the language. Every class needs an interface. Our C is written OO (see old GNOME).

For the ecosystem you have extremes. C where debugging and performance profiling are well defined practice, but modern dependency management doesn’t exit. The JavaScript ecosystem changes so rapidly, documentation is usually out of date, “nobody does that anymore”, etc.

And so much awful comes from trying to force a language into something the language wasn’t originally designed or even used for. Your Haskell example here. Adding functional language features and convoluted asynch to every freaking language is another. People create things much harder to learn than a new language with a mature ecosystem and culture in a domain just to avoid “learning a new language.”

In woodworking, I can do pretty much anything with a chisel. But I plane with a plane, saw with a saw, use specialty planes for rabbets, etc. Each has a learning curve, but I’ll end up with a better, more consistent result. And really, they’re all just chisels with jigs in different configurations. But I’m going to use a chisel where it’s still best, like mortising. Well, and where I’m not sure I want to invest in a more specialized tool yet and risk my wife killing me. Then I use C… I mean, a chisel.

We wrote our programs on special pads of paper, transferred them to punch cards, gave our decks to operators who would run our programs on an IBM. Around a half hour later the operators gave us back printouts with the results of our runs. Most people didn't wait around but my friend and I would stay late so we could get more runs in. If we were nice to the operator they might bump our job up in the queue.

Most of the programs we wrote were very simple. Things you could easily do now with a few lines of a modern scripting language.

Our class's teacher was a professional COBOL programmer who had a day job working at a soda company. Some kind of emergency came up at his job half way through the course and he stopped showing up so we were left on our own for a few weeks.

Just before the end of the class the department head took over and told everyone they would need to implement a binary search on the final exam. This was way too hard for most of the other students but not a big deal for my friend and I. We were done in a few minutes.

I was also fortunate to meet another guy in the class who asked me to help him with some programs he had to write at his job. He was a soil engineer who wanted to move into a finance job but found the programming work difficult, so I spent a few hours a week tutoring him and writing programs with him.

Eventually I graduated and he ran out of work for me but by then we became good friends. While I can't say I got much out of of the COBOL class I'm glad I took it because if I hadn't I would not have met him.

From Wikipedia "other compilers, like IBM COBOL, will produce code that prints "1 2 3 END END END END ..." and so on, printing "END" over and over in an endless loop." [1]

Also, having never used COBOL, the PERFORM statement is pretty cool. Like calling arbitrary parts of a Switch statement with a single line. Would be neat if some other languages had that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Procedures