I've "struggled" with it for two years as well. Never cared to
do my assignments, so I failed. It's not that hard in the
end. Although VSAM, OS/390, MVS, JCL and all that crap
sure confuses you. I hate COBOL. I'll never respect
it. It's so fucking weak.
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Tell that to ALL the major banks, aerospace manufacturers, hell, manufacturers of almost anything, hosptials, insurance companies,....
You get the picture. If you need to pound big numbers through databases, over and over again, and produce checks and statements for millions of people, or handle millions of part numbers in warehouses around the planet, you use COBOL, on big old mainframes.
When you want nice management reports from these processes, you use a little unix, perl, java, etc.
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True there is an awful lot of COBOL about and lots of people
are using it in the way that you say. However the
fact that it is widespread does not mean that it is
still widespread through choice, it just means that it has
been very popular in the past.
Think about how much money has been spent in the last five
years making sure that legacy systems written in COBOL could
handle the year 2000. OK, got that mental picture? now
imagine how many magnitudes greater the task of rewriting
all! of that code in a more modern language would be.
Scarey!
I have a friend who works for British Telecom on their
billing software. The legacy stuff is all COBOL, but
anything they write now is done in c. If COBOL was so
wonderful more projects being written now would be
written in COBOL.
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John, that's cool. Use it to your heart's content! Take care! | [reply] |