Re: Which language would be most helpful?

Interesting collection of comments. But...

Go for COBOL. Seriously. While lots of people slag on the language, that's a bit rude, as the language is generally older than any of its detractors.

Learning COBOL won't necessarily teach you that much about computer languages, but what it will teach you is how to handle a large class of real-world problems that C++ and VB won't. (And when you do get stuck trying to solve those problems with C++ and VB, you'll know why they're a bad idea)

COBOL is a very good language for its niche, which is business data processing. It's not a sexy niche, but it's a huge one, and more importantly it's a necessary one.

Comment on Re: Which language would be most helpful?

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Re: Re: Which language would be most helpful? by gjb (Vicar) on Feb 02, 2003 at 23:37 UTC
Since I've never looked into COBOL seriously I'd like to have some examples of that large class of problems C++ and VB can't handle, it sounds interesting (no irony here). Regardless of this point: bear in mind that many businesses simply don't have COBOL around anymore, so yes, you'll be going for a niche. Personally I consider that to be a bad start of a career. Just my 2 cents, -gjb- Update: My measure for COBOL's "evolutionary success" is the number of job ads in Belgian publications that require COBOL skills vs. those that require C++/Java. Moreover, I don't think COBOL is part of the curriculum of any CS education in Belgium. Another point of interest: a former colleague of mine who has a degree in physics managed to get a job done in COBOL without too much trouble, but he'd still be hard pressed to do anything OO related. The scope of C++ is more general than that of COBOL, which means that one should get in touch with a broader range of concepts and ideas while studying it. A very important point made by Elian: one is much more motivated to study when something is interesting and the typical COBOL application might be kind of dull.	[reply]
Re (3): Which language would be most helpful? by VSarkiss (Monsignor) on Feb 02, 2003 at 23:59 UTC
many businesses simply don't have COBOL around anymore I strongly disagree. Every large financial or supply-chain client I've worked with has COBOL in place for order entry and/or accounting functions. It's still used heavily for data-intensive "business back-end" systems. If you qualify what kind of businesses you mean (by line or by size), I may be more inclined to agree, but that's a pretty broad statement you're making. As for what the questioner originally asked, I don't think any of the choices will make Perl easier to learn, but I do think learning COBOL will teach TIMTOWTDI better than the others.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Which language would be most helpful? by Elian (Parson) on Feb 03, 2003 at 14:45 UTC
Since I've never looked into COBOL seriously I'd like to have some examples of that large class of problems C++ and VB can't handle, it sounds interesting (no irony here). Actually, is's fairly dull. COBOL is designed for business use (that's what the B in the acronym is from) and it excels at doing business and financial tasks. COBOL has good facilities for handling money. It doesn't, for example, make the horrible error of trying to do financial calculations with floating point numbers. (Important safety tip: Don't try to do decimal math with a representation that can't handle base-10 fractions) Regardless of this point: bear in mind that many businesses simply don't have COBOL around anymore, so yes, you'll be going for a niche. Personally I consider that to be a bad start of a career. All computer languages target a niche. You are, however, badly misjudging the amount of COBOL in use as well as the amount being written brand new. There's an enourmous amount in every major (and most minor) financial institutions, as well as most places that have major financial departments. (Which includes the AP, AR, and payroll departments) It's also in a lot of other places you might not expect. It wouldn't, quite bluntly, surprise me to find that there's more new COBOL code being written than C++ code. By a factor of two or more. (Probably more) There's certainly an order of magnitude or four more COBOL in use than C++.	[reply]