Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#71

Post by nar001 » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

srhtftw wrote: post #56

Back in the 80's a friend and I took a COBOL course at a community college in the evening when we were in high school. Most students were much older than we were. 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…

I Hope your friend got to move into the finance sector? Did he get a grasp of programming after a while?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#72

Post by kjs3 » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC

nwsm wrote: post #42

I took a mainframe class in college (2016) after my mom encouraged me to (she just recently retired as a COBOL/JCL developer of 35+ years). We learned COBOL and JCL on zOS and completed IBM's Master the Mainframe challenge. It was a very interesting experience and a different paradigm than any other CS/information systems classes I took. I could have gotten a job doing this work very easily. When I was applying and i…

small city it the south US that I wanted to leave

Columbus, GA, by any chance?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#73

Post by mcraenich » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 12:21 PM UTC

I took a class on it around 2013 in college, mainly out of interest, not because I wanted to use it. It was that experience that convinced me I'd never actually want to work with it for money.

It was an interesting experience, but absolutely nothing about it was enjoyable, the language, the tooling, the support. All of it.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#74

Post by marpstar » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 2:52 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #66

marpstar wrote: post #7

I 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…

Very cool slice of life, thanks. I didn’t imagine in 2009 that even a single university would have been invested in COBOL.

It felt weird at the time, but I think the reach of COBOL is underestimated by just about everyone. I just checked the university's website and they still have their introductory Programming in COBOL course as well as a 400-level "Applications in Information Systems" course that "includes coverage of advanced features of the COBOL language."

Northwestern Mutual is based in Milwaukee and is where most of the grads I knew who went down the COBOL path either started out or ended up.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#75

Post by runjake » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 3:29 PM UTC

Back in the 1980s, when it was still the business language. I don't have enough nostalgia in me to even glance at it now, unless a big paycheck accompanies it.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#76

Post by srhtftw » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

nar001 wrote: post #71

srhtftw wrote: post #56

Back in the 80's a friend and I took a COBOL course at a community college in the evening when we were in high school. Most students were much older than we were. 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…

I Hope your friend got to move into the finance sector? Did he get a grasp of programming after a while?

He never got the hang of programming but he did eventually transition into a nice job in finance at a small startup called Sun Microsystems.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#77

Post by jkka » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

srhtftw wrote: post #76

nar001 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I Hope your friend got to move into the finance sector? Did he get a grasp of programming after a while?

He never got the hang of programming but he did eventually transition into a nice job in finance at a small startup called Sun Microsystems.

Hmm, must have been a really small startup. Doesn't seem like it had any impact on OSes and the software industry at all! xD

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#78

Post by gilcot » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

Here. Lean it just for fun and curiosity, and never use it in my career.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#79

Post by rupurt » Wed, Sep 13, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #63

rupurt wrote: post #59

We're doing Mainframe modernizations/integrations with the cloud @Mechanical Orchard. It's been really fun to see and learn the entomology of how computing got to where it is today. As other folks have described programming on the mainframe is about learning COBOL + JCL. I would also add that you need to understand how to read/write binary files according to a defined schema (Copybook) and encoding (EBCDIC, COMP, COM…

Not sure what word you were looking for, but entomology is the study of bugs. Etymology, maybe? The study of the history of words? "People who don't know the difference between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words."

Thank you :) Etymology is what I meant. Been using the wrong word my whole life... :0

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

#80

Post by nobozo » Thu, Sep 14, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

One thing I believe was true in the COBOL+JCL world of the 1980s is that you couldn't write a program that would read the name of a file, and then open that file. All files to be accessed had to be specified statically with JCL.

Am I remembering correctly?