Happy Birthday Cobol

On a sunny day (Thu, 28 May 2009 12:31:42 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

This one was fun too:

State controller John Chiang has said it would take six months to re-configure California's aging COBOL-based payroll system in order to cut the salaries of California's 200,000 state employees, under an order from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to try and rein in the deficit. [...] Ironically, the only ones who can make the changes - part time retired COBOL programmers - were among 10,000 employees laid off as part of the cuts.

And: Dijkstra famously described it is as a "disease" and noted: "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."

Cheers, James Arthur

...by the same lady that gave us the term "bug"; was YEARS ahead of everyone else until she left us.

During WW2 she was assigned to estimate the losses for taking each island in the chain to Mainland Japan. She provided that, but also estimated the cost of simply bypassing various islands. This saved the deadly cost of taking islands that were militarily worthless.

It also partly lead to the stories of finding Japanese soldiers holed up on some island 10 years later and unaware that the war was over.

They named a Destroyer after her in 1996.

Some of them didn't surrender until the 1970s:

Well, Pascal and Modula and Dijkstra are gone, and COBOL lives on. As the Reg piece says, it just works.

John

Borland's Turbo Pascal was super. I still like it. A lot of QuickBasic's coolness was kludged onto it from Turbo Pascal. Blazing fast single-pass compilation, with decent code generation.

As for COBOL, the world desperately needs a COBOL-script plug-in for Internet Explorer...

Grins, James Arthur

I once got asked by a young woman if I'd tutor her in COBOL. She brought the book, and it (the COBOL) was surprisingly easy. Turned out, so was she! She only wanted to get in my knickers, you see. (leer, snort!) ;-P

Cheers! Rich

I once had a programmer job at a place where they used MP/M and an 8085/8088 dual processor. Three other programmers used DBASE, and I used assembler language. (I was writing a cross-referencer.)

On the other side of the room was the business office, and they used COBOL for their stuff. I happened to look over the shoulder of the COBOL programmer, and I remarked, "Why do I feel like I'm watching her program with stone axes and animal skins?"

Cheers! Rich

PowerBasic is the direct descendent of TurboBasic, so likely has the same compiler guts. But they finally re-wrote the PB compiler in PB.

John

Lisp is one of the few languages Dijkstra didn't seem to have any objections to, and that's also still around (and even older than COBOL; only Fortran is older still, and that's also still around).

Pascal, and more often the descendant Delphi, and Modula are still in use, too. Of course, real programmers don't use Pascal:

I didn't learn anything new, except that "quiche eaters" can be translated with "Müslifresser" :-)

I understand that there is supposed to be a Visual Cobol. BTW, just because Cobol was designed for business applications, does not mean it is limited...

I still remember the COBOL I learned way back in college. Saved the bacon of one state agency because they had nobody that knew COBOL let in residence and they couldn't do Y2K checks.

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Yep, back when object everything was cool there was object-COBOL as well.

Was she using punch cards?

A REAL man isn't afraid to eat quiche, if it's prepared properly. ;-)

Cheers! Rich