Saturday, February 26, 2022

COBOL

IEEE Spectrum has an article about the increasing problem of all the COBOL programmers retiring.  I used to room with a guy whose personalized license plate was I COBOL.

I have actually written a trivial COBOL program once long ago, as trivial as any COBOL program can be.  Have you ever looked at all the crap that starts a COBOL program?

2 comments:

  1. In the late 70s, I graduated from Computer Operator (IBM S/370) to Programmer Trainee... and the next 10-15 years were pretty much COBOL Immersion. (And I took every class offered at Boise State.) I LOVE COBOL! Took considerable pride in my "structured COBOL," called subroutines, embedded documentation, etc.

    I retired about 3 years ago, but hadn't seen any COBOL in at least 15 years, leading up to that.

    Don't get too comfortable with ANYTHING in information technology, because it'll all be obsolete in 20 years.

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  2. I suspect there's a reason we never had COBOL in engineering school (or since).

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