Re: COBOL, Article on new mainframe use

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.
--
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