Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.misty.com!news.iecc.com!.POSTED.news.iecc.com!not-for-mail
From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:14:51 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
Message-ID: <v9nmsr$2haj$1@gal.iecc.com>
References: <v9iqko$h7vd$1@dont-email.me> <f7fe11f84f9342f0a7e27d4a729aadad@www.novabbs.org> <li71t8Fs9jnU1@mid.individual.net> <v9mc57$15mm9$2@dont-email.me>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:14:51 -0000 (UTC)
Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970";
	logging-data="83283"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com"
In-Reply-To: <v9iqko$h7vd$1@dont-email.me> <f7fe11f84f9342f0a7e27d4a729aadad@www.novabbs.org> <li71t8Fs9jnU1@mid.individual.net> <v9mc57$15mm9$2@dont-email.me>
Cleverness: some
X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010)
Originator: johnl@iecc.com (John Levine)
Bytes: 3175
Lines: 39

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:06:16 +0300, Niklas Holsti wrote:
>
>> Dewar used to say that COBOL is the "Rodney Dangerfield of programming
>> languages", which just "don't get no respect".
>
>Except people laughed *with* Rodney Dangerfield, whereas they laugh *at* 
>COBOL. For Dangerfield, it was just an act, after all: you don’t think his 
>real life was like that, do you?
>
>COBOL was designed specifically for “business” computing, back when there 
>was a clearly demarcation of what this meant: no need for complex 
>mathematical formulae, no need for string/text manipulation, no need for 
>interactive terminals.
>
>One major crack in this wall came with the introduction of relational 
>DBMSes, particularly ones using SQL as their interface language: suddenly, 
>the use of such databases became very much a core “business” need.
>
>The best way to interface to such a DBMS was to be able to generate SQL 
>strings on the fly; but this required some facility with manipulation of 
>dynamic, variable-length strings, which COBOL completely lacked. And so 
>special extensions were tacked on, just to cope with the generation of SQL 
>queries and templates.

Back when I was in school it was fashionable to sneer at COBOL, but I don't
think many of the people doing the sneering knew anything about the language.
For example, it has coroutines implemented in a very useful way.  I doubt any
of them knew that, and at the time, very few other languages did.

The current version of COBOL has a lot of extensions over the 1960s version
which should be no surprise.  The current versions of Fortran and C are a
lot bigger than the classic versions, too.

For some kinds of work, COBOL is still an entirely reasonable language, albeit
one where the learning curve can be pretty steep.
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly