On the one hand we love and respect Admiral Grace Hopper and on the other hand the COBOL language she is credited with is scorned. I always thought this was somewhat unusual.
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GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
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Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#92Ah COBOL, oddly enough I started my first dev job in COBOL in the banking industry(I'm in my 30s and started my professional coding career in my 20s), I have mixed feelings about it...it's a weird language but it has it's place, I wouldn't advise anyone to jump into a COBOL career path unless you are doing it for a job and a job alone.
I would kill to get a personal mainframe though. Read a story some time ago about some guy who snagged one from a government auction. Sadly they never have anything cool when I look.
The Hercules emulator plus the MVS 3.8j version of the IBM mainframe operating system are both freely available.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#93Any stories from production users of GnuCOBOL?
I’m curious too, my understanding is that 90% of COBOL work is done in older mainframes (or ported from older mainframes to newer ones) and likely uses whatever IBM compilers. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of GnuCOBOL being used outside of learning.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the interfaces I've seen that interact with COBOL running on mainframes are built with Java. Not sure if this helps, but could also lead into working close/near with mainframes and COBOL.
Quite a few companies have specialized in migrating COBOL to C# or Java code, so I’m not surprised. I wonder why they choose those languages as one-trick ponies though. Seems like the “we only have a hammer” problem.
I guess because it's very very likely the rest of the custom internal systems is already written in one of those languages, they are both used a lot in such contexts.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#95Ah COBOL, oddly enough I started my first dev job in COBOL in the banking industry(I'm in my 30s and started my professional coding career in my 20s), I have mixed feelings about it...it's a weird language but it has it's place, I wouldn't advise anyone to jump into a COBOL career path unless you are doing it for a job and a job alone.
I would kill to get a personal mainframe though. Read a story some time ago about some guy who snagged one from a government auction. Sadly they never have anything cool when I look.
Ebay sometimes has them
Otherwise if you live in the Midwest...uw oshkosh use to have one for free. The stipulation was that you had to remove it from the campus. And it weighed 3 tons
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#96And they say only Rust makes it to the front page of HN. More seriously is this release particularly notable in the COBOL world? I know very little about the language and I find it odd to find the Changelog of a minor release at the top of the frontpage.
GnuCOBOL seems to be the de-facto standard COBOL implementation on Unix-like platforms these days, so (at least) it is a notable software. They seem to have no actual blog, so the changelog is the best news link I could come up with...
I don't think this is the de-facto standard, probably moreso Microfocus, or perhaps NetCobol.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#97I do not get all the hatred. The idea behind COBOL’s syntax is the same as SQL’s: it is merely yet another “Structured English Query/Programming Language” designed, initially, for non-programmers to be able to describe in words what it is they would like to accomplish in a way they could be understood by the computer.
The hatred comes from people like me, who have worked with COBOL and will tell you it's terribly frustrating to work with, needlessly verbose in multiple places where it doesn't need to be, and often used in banks for purposes which are the death of all you hold dear or interesting to work with. COBOL is not an interesting programming language these days, and you should not learn it unless you need it for your curren…
> COBOL jobs are not particularly well-paying, and there are young people learning it, and no, they don't get awesome paychecks.
Yup. All the articles on the shortage of COBOL programmers is actually companies whining that they can't find cheap labor. If they paid well, they'd have their pick of young and old.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#98COBOL, Assembler, and FORTRAN are actually kind of cool.
Having spent much of my time in Fortan 90 the last couple of months - I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on this one. You know all these people saying "when will I ever have to write mu own hash table?" Well, when you start working in Fortran.
F90 isn't bad, try F77. F90 and on you had more options with the layout of your program so that it was actually sensible. And you can use recursion without having to check if your compiler supports it. And reentrant functions.
But the built-in types are collection types are anemic, it's similar to C in that regard. It's a relatively low-level language compared to other high-level languages. But if I were doing math/simulation stuffs, I would definitely consider using it again.
Just, please, no more embedded programs written in Fortran. That was a bad idea (unless it's doing complex math like for the radar system).
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hatred comes from people like me, who have worked with COBOL and will tell you it's terribly frustrating to work with, needlessly verbose in multiple places where it doesn't need to be, and often used in banks for purposes which are the death of all you hold dear or interesting to work with. COBOL is not an interesting programming language these days, and you should not learn it unless you need it for your curren…
> COBOL jobs are not particularly well-paying, and there are young people learning it, and no, they don't get awesome paychecks. Yup. All the articles on the shortage of COBOL programmers is actually companies whining that they can't find cheap labor. If they paid well, they'd have their pick of young and old.
Well, if they paid for COBOL courses, that is. COBOL still evolves.
Re: GnuCOBOL 3.1.1
#100This seems like a great candidate for a future Advent of Code! Old languages have a special place in my heart, so doing Advent of Code with them is kind of fun. I'm doing this year's in UniVerse BASIC[0] which traces its roots back to Pick[1] which is only six years newer than COBOL, but manages to be less well-known. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25250582 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_s…
I'm doing in COBOL: https://github.com/GaloisGirl/Coding/tree/master/AdventOfCod...
I'm having a problem with day 7 with the lack of hash tables.
Care to share your BASIC solutions?