[ARCHIVED THREAD] - COBOL (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 2/4/2013 11:25:37 PM EDT
| Tell us your experiences with it. |
| We still code in COBOL here, and plan to stick with mainframe screens for about another year as we transition to web interfaces. Even after that transition we're still going to use COBOL for the back end of the interfaces and for batch processing for the foreseeable future. |
| My first paid software work was in COBOL while I was in high school. I used it to write an interpreter for a language to do financial reporting. That must have been 1982 and it seemed like a throwback at the time since I'd already been writing in BASIC and Pascal for fun. |
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My first paid software work was in COBOL while I was in high school. I used it to write an interpreter for a language to do financial reporting. That must have been 1982 and it seemed like a throwback at the time since I'd already been writing in BASIC and Pascal for fun. Throwback? Hell, my first job was coding in Assembler, which at the time I learned mostly for fun, and that company used it all the way into the mid-90s. Some of the programs I was responsible for were written before I was born and documented on crumbling flowcharts. |
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My first paid software work was in COBOL while I was in high school. I used it to write an interpreter for a language to do financial reporting. That must have been 1982 and it seemed like a throwback at the time since I'd already been writing in BASIC and Pascal for fun. Throwback? Hell, my first job was coding in Assembler, which at the time I learned mostly for fun, and that company used it all the way into the mid-90s. One of the many cool things about that job was a period where they thought we would need assembly language for one interface problem, so they paid me just to study it full time on my own for a couple of weeks. I'm sure it helped when I later got into C, and I loved the discipline of it, like playing a musical instrument. Man, I used to love programming. Simple sprite animation, recursive fractal Persion-rug type graphics, but best of all writing my first program to generate Dungeons and Dragons characters (yeah, nevah been done befoah), working it through day after day on paper for the three-hour period I might get every few months in front of a real computer. |
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COBOL, Fortran 4, Assembly, 1968, College, Systems Analysis and Design, IBM System 360.
Good God, Could you take me any farther back??? Later on, I used to program Assembly (also known as machine language) on Commodores (VIC20 and C64) just for jollies. We were the ones that created Y2K. |
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Picked up a book in '79, put it back down, and went the opposite direction. Friend of mine chose the Pick route. Lost touch with him, hope he did well. In the early 80's hacked the RMX86 boot strap so Forth floppies could be booted from system proms. Voila, instant environment for manufacturing test. That was fun for a little while, then I endured a bit of PL/M, discovered C from a nerdy dork running our PDP-11 (I was watching him play Zork at the time), then totally switched from hardware to software, eventually with C/C++ under VxWorks and XP Embedded, with a lot of target processors up to that point. Nowadays I just poke around with Javascript and watch Da_Bunny terrorize Piers Morgan and the rest of the libtards on twitter. |
| I used COBOL for about 5 years when I worked for a state lottery agency. I have used FORTRAN 4, 5 and 77, COBOL, SNOBOL, Z80, ADA, HPL, and a lot of other languages over the past 30 years. For me, it was never so much as the language I used, it was whether there was going to be a programming challenge. |
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Tell us your experiences with it. I still have to make changes to modules at work on a periodic basis. I have to make a change in one this week, in fact. A one line change, but still a hassle because I do it so infrequently that half my shit gets migrated to tape, and I have to muddle through the cryptic TSO interface just to do change management and version control inside of Changeman. It's even worse when it's a large change because then I have to pull the dataset down to my workstation so that I can view it on a real editor that actually scrolls, make my changes, then transfer it back up to the mainframe and stage it back into a Changeman package for promotion. PITA. Normally, I spend most of my time in a Web Distributed Java home-brewed application, thankfully. But a good portion of my group uses COBOL daily. Nature of the Insurance company beast I suppose. 'Entrenched' and 'Legacy' are always the first words that come to mind when I have to deal with it. E. |
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Quoted: Missed out on COBOL for programming class, I had Basic and Visual Basic. "I wouldn't say I was missing it, Bob." Yet I still had to take a class in MVS/JCL. "Systems Software"  I work with MVS/JCL in a batch processing environment... Beats sheetmetal/HVAC work I used to do but some days I wanna scream. |
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I had to write a lot of COBOL in my last job, but management got all excited about some sort of new programming paradigm so they had us transition from COBOL to a new "object oriented" variant just last year: Click To View Spoiler It can't beat the old S0C4 joke. My old jobs were batch COBOL running against IMS and IDMS databases. I also did a lot of work in ADS/Online (the online language for IDMS databases). I was taught IDMS and ADS/Online by one of the guys that invented it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDMS |
| I've been an MVS now z/OS systems programmer for way too many years. COBOL is what they try to teach college kids with accounting degrees in our shop. As for me, I stopped using it years ago, once I finally faced the fact that I was a horrible typer. Now I'm exclusively assembler. We used to say that COBOL was for folks that couldn't write assember/BAL. |
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COBOL, Fortran 4, Assembly, 1968, College, Systems Analysis and Design, IBM System 360. Good God, Could you take me any farther back??? Later on, I used to program Assembly (also known as machine language) on Commodores (VIC20 and C64) just for jollies. We were the ones that created Y2K. I dunno about any of that except assembly on the C64. |
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I tried to learn it when I was in school for Programming. I hated it. My father owns a very successful consulting business that specializes in COBOL/ Micro Focus
Legacy Migration, Distributed Platform Architectures, Complete Data and Process Migration, Application Development and Extension Tools He always told me that anyone that specializes in this field is going to make a killing. He and one of his good friends are rated in the top 10 programmers in the Country in COBOL, I on the other hand chose poorly 
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When I was learning FORTRAN on IBM punch cards (Hah!) I got stuck in a
nested "Do Loop" and crashed the entire University Printing system on a massive print override. 500 or so pages of complete black. That would cost about eleventy billion dollars in HP print cartridges. |