in reply to A Recollection

That's not so hard. How many languages were there in the start of programming.
COBOL whas one of the easiest languages, best suited for the machines of those days. The language had some advantages in that time.
But now the time has come an let it rest the language is dead.

No OOP with COBOL. No real features you can use... It was nice but COBOL isn't that hard. The challenge in that time was to fit the program in the limited hardware.

--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right

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RE: RE: A Recollection
by gaudior (Pilgrim) on May 08, 2000 at 20:35 UTC
    The language is NOT dead. Our core product is a havy-duty cobol crunching engine. It runs under Micro-Focus on a variety of unix boxes, including Linux. We have added some Java front-ends to it, and some additional reporting and data mining capabilities. But the core is still COBOL, and will be for many many years. What COBOL does, it does well. TMTOWTDI applies across languages and platforms.
[reply]
      You are absolutely right, COBOL is not dead, and I don't see it
      going away for a few years at least. And certainly, the job that
      it does, it does well, but that does not mitigate the pain and
      anguish that comes from having to code large COBOL systems.8^)
      Whoever wants to work on COBOL is more than welcome to, I will not
      question their choice, but I know that it is not for me, and I am
      happier working with things like Perl. just my $0.02.
[reply]
RE: RE: A Recollection
by mikfire (Deacon) on May 09, 2000 at 01:14 UTC
    Actually, I hate to be the one to bring this up, but there does exist Object-Oriented Cobol. Scary but true. Mik who is adding nothing really useful to this conversation
[reply]
RE: RE: A Recollection
by cciulla (Friar) on May 08, 2000 at 21:49 UTC
[reply]

In Section Meditations