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Having spent some part of my career rewriting COBOL into Java (1.4, so, you know, not cutting edge) I don't really have much good to say about COBOL but I have
by ihumanable 6y ago
Having spent some part of my career rewriting COBOL into Java (1.4, so, you know, not cutting edge) I don't really have much good to say about COBOL but I have found the coverage of COBOL so weird in the media.
As you very rightly pointed out, no one ever goes, "The networking stack in your smartphone is written in C, a nearly 50 year old programming language" but governments underfund their IT infrastructure and then go, "Welp, nothing we could do, COBOL is sooooo old."
The amount of mismanagement that gets deflected away by pointing at COBOL and tapping into the largely justified distaste the development community has for COBOL is a real convenient out for the people responsible for that mismanagement.
- CSSer 6y agoI don't know who originally said it, but does the old adage, "code is harder to read than it is to write" apply here? Is COBOL more difficult to read than C?
- anadem 6y agoCOBOL's a lot simpler in that the words are (should be) more expressive, but as it's less powerful than C it's less terse and there's a lot more reading to do. So the ability to understand a program isn't necessarily better in COBOL than in C.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoOK, but in C I have functions to open, read, and write sockets. Do I have them in COBOL? This matters, because with C I can connect my existing C software to a web server, which lets me tie ancient software into the modern infrastructure. I suspect that's harder to do with COBOL...
- Koshkin 6y agoWell, C only “has” these things because they are in a library (which, by the way, doesn’t even have to be written in C).
- pjmlp 6y agoYes, you even do have objects for that matter. Latest Cobol revision is from 2014 and you even have Visual Cobol, https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/features https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/featu...