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Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?

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

#61

Post by cardiffspaceman »

As a teenager in 1975, I was interested in programming, and found that my county library branch had introductory books on a half-dozen languages, including COBOL. I checked out each book and implemented a small set of programs. I had no machine, I carefully desk-checked each program.

In the case of COBOL, calculations were tedious. I escaped into the loving arms of the COMPUTE statement. I later read that this was a cultural violation similar to using unPythonic code in Python. But I didn’t have a mentor, much less a reviewer.

I think this counts as “for fun”. I later earned minor ducats writing little RPG programs, and the rest of my career has been far, far away from such programs.

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

#63

Post by BenjiWiebe »

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."

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

#64

Post by xwowsersx »

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."

Seems like a typo and they meant "evolution"

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

#65

Post by tomcam »

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 think I speak for many readers of Hacker News when I say that I never imagined COBOL to be fertile ground to develop lasting human relationships

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

#66

Post by tomcam »

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.

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

#67

Post by tomcam »

anyonecancode wrote: post #16
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…

> 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 with…

If you’ve written about this on a blog somewhere, I would love to hear the lowdown in detail as deep as you wanted to go.

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

#68

Post by SoftTalker »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #34

It's on my list of languages to learn, but I haven't gotten to it yet. My first job was supporting a custom application running in UniVerse on Solaris. It originally ran on a Prime mainframe and UniVerse was one of the ways you could run this type of software on a modern system. I really enjoyed working in the Pick MultiValue environment. In many ways, this was a NoSQL database from before NoSQL was a big thing. I do…

NoSQL databases (in the sense of key/value stores) are a very old idea. I never understood why that was such a hotness. The pendulum never stops I guess.

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

#69

Post by MarcusE1W »

giaour wrote: post #50
tyingq wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on the idea that mainframe COBOL is typically only part of the actual program. But COBOL not being Turing complete sounds...not right.

I'm not using the formal definition here -- I meant that there are programs you can write in other mainstream programming languages that just can't be expressed in COBOL due to limitations on recursion. The COBOL spec doesn't allow recursive "paragraphs" (functions), though some implementations support it. (This may no longer be the case, or this limitation may have been specific to the language version used at my jo…

You can use recursion in COBOL, you just have to write your own stack first. But I agree, it’s definitely more limited than other languages.

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

#70

Post by anonzzzies »

The biggest thing is that it’s not the language. Cobol is trivial for any seasoned programmer, however no one is looking for a ‘just’ cobol programmer, they are looking for someone who understands and knows the ins and out of the mainframe (etc) eco system. I don’t mind cobol as a language; it’s very friendly to read imho and writing is too much typing but not hard.
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