4 ms·
New IDEs make working in COBOL as easy as C#, VB or Ruby.
- jsmcgd 16y agoIt would be good if Micro Focus released an Eclipse plugin too.
- nerds-central 16y agoThey do... Hopefully there should be a community knol on that as well in the near future.
- Br1t 16y agoTake a look at http://www.microfocus.com/eclipse http://www.microfocus.com/eclipse.
- create_account 16y agoThat title ("Visual Studio COBOL") reminded me of the less-serious "Cobol on Cogs" site: http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
- nerds-central 16y agoI love that site. They way it flickers and has screen burn effects are so kitch :)
- bond 16y agoHere's a word i haven't heard in a long time... In those days we chose to learn Clipper over Cobol, each CL would take 2-3 minutes to compile on a 8086 processor. Now it takes less than 1 sec to do it, lol
- nerds-central 16y agoHow is Clipper doing these days? COBOL is making a resurgence as people realise it works!
- larrywright 16y agoWhile this might make the actual process of typing in the code easier, it doesn't make the language any better. I still can't imagine choosing to use COBOL over using Ruby or even C#.
- nerds-central 16y agoThe point is that there is a lot of COBOL already out there, so someone has to maintained it and add to it. What is more, C# is not a perfect language for business its self, neither is Ruby. With good tooling the difference are small. Actually, in my case I would never recommend using Ruby for a commercial project - but that is another discussion for another time :)
- larrywright 16y agoThere's been a lot of ruby code written on commercial projects, I think the developers (and customers) would disagree with that. I also think you're way off on the amount of difference between C# and COBOL. The fact that COBOL requires good tooling to be usable is telling in and of itself.
- CountHackulus 16y agoBelieve it or not, just last night I was wishing I could use COBOL instead of C for a project. For simple read/process/write of fixed size binary records, COBOL is a dream to work with. You'd be surprised, there's still some awesome optimizing compilers being written for COBOL.
- nerds-central 16y agoThat is the sort of thing COBOL does well :)
- philwelch 16y agoHow much COBOL is there still out there?
- nerds-central 16y agoBillions of lines of COBOL will 10s or even 100s of millions of lines written every year. Each time someone makes a mobile phone call, uses a credit card, books an airline ticket - 99% chance COBOL will handle part of that transaction.