2 ms·

My (uninformed) perception is that 30% of the (apparent) complexity of COBOL is due to its verbosity, some 40% of (self-inflicted) due to brainded/outdated APIs

My (uninformed) perception is that 30% of the (apparent) complexity of COBOL is due to its verbosity, some 40% of (self-inflicted) due to brainded/outdated APIs (wanna write a binary file? lol no, you have to pretend it's a report, because that's all people that wear a tie know) and the rest is due to you having 20 jobs stepping on each others toes in the same system instead of a consistent data path So job 1 reads your data and does light processing (good) job 2 turns it into a CSV of weird codes and turns BCD straight into base-10 digits integers (huh), job 3 then reconverts this back and joins this with more DB data and finally saves that data (split into every 12 customers) into a file with a sequential file name based on week number and current time in US Central time zone (but the system is in Germany)

Pamar 3y ago
I used COBOL for maybe 5 years (roughly from 1988 to 1993). The language is not complex at all, but as you correctly point out it is verbose. And handling variables is quite tedious. It can work more or less fine if you couple it with a RDBMS, but if you are instead using IBM files and job scheduling/control you add another layer of stuff to learn. Again, more tedious than esoteric. I would not enjoy going back to it, probably (in any case I am not really writing code anymore in my current position) but if it was the only alternative to starving I would have no big qualms picking it up again.