4 ms·

Whose hatred? I don't think I've seen anybody really hate on COBOL, it's just mostly irrelevant for modern programmers and people like to mock the FULL CAPS ULT

by simias 6y ago

Whose hatred? I don't think I've seen anybody really hate on COBOL, it's just mostly irrelevant for modern programmers and people like to mock the FULL CAPS ULTRA VERBOSE SYNTAX (something that COBOL programmers themselves routinely do, see ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL).

rhabarba 6y ago
I disagree with your definition of modern programmers. I mean, we still emulate VT100 terminals on our 2020 MacBooks (poorly), so the implication that everything old must be renewed is - in theory - good, but COBOL is probably not the first thing that comes to my mind here... Modern COBOL does not enforce CAPS LOCK anymore though - and you can even skip the 7-columns indentation if you wish!
- simias 6y ago
  To be clear I wasn't making a judgement of value, I was just stating matter-of-factly that I've been a professional dev for over 15 years and while I did occasionally encounter some more niche languages I haven't actually bumped into a COBOL listing if I wasn't specifically looking for it. Fortran, Scheme, Haskell, Erlang, Modula? Occasionally. COBOL, never.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    > Modula Ok now I’m curious...
    - simias 6y ago
      FreeBSD's old CVSup was written in Modula-3: https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/3.0-RELEASE/usr/share/doc/handbook/cvsup:install.html https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/3.0-RELEASE/usr/share/doc/handb...
      - the_only_law 6y ago
        Neat, I’ve been down a rabbit hole with many of Wirth’s languages a few times, but never properly learned them. I think I tried to get some Modula 2 or Modula 3 gcc frontend to work a while back with little luck.
ape4 6y ago
Less verbose `ADD 1 TO LINE.` or there is the handy `COMPUTE N = A + B + 5;`