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Cobol Isn't Dead

Posted by timothy on from the not-quite dept.

YellowYahoo writes "Ever wondered how to combine old and new technology for fun and profit? Doing their part to continue COBOL's dominance of installed software, Deskware has developed a COBOL based scripting language designed for serving web pages. Whether or not COBOL will succeed as the next great web language, is obvously up to some debate, but there is at least one active site deployed in Cobolscript. According to their FAQ, their main advantage is leveraging existing employees' programming knowledge. Does that make it a reasonable language to use? There's certainly some justification that COBOL makes a better langauge for implementing business rules than either Perl or Java. Time to dust off (or start learning?) all those older languages!"

4 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. Lol, that's rich. by BoomerSooner · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I specifically didn't take Advanced COBOL in college because I didn't want a dead end job fixing Y2K bugs. I feel sorry for anyone that is working with those old JCL/COBOL based systems.

    Although, as more people start to fall from the ranks of "knowing" COBOL the remaining few that can service the large amount of systems out there should do really well financially.

    I have an old COBOL compiler for an ancient version of Xenix (2.3.4 I think) on 5.25" Floppies! I may dust it off and take a look for fun at some of the old code I've got laying around.

    COBOL programming is like these old guys I worked with that hang their hat on DOS programming in Clipper, sad. What was impressive in 1993, is no longer impressive.

  2. COBOL for business logic != COBOL for presentation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    There's certainly some justification that COBOL makes a better langauge for implementing business rules than either Perl or Java.
    So implement your business logic in COBOL and call it from your Java code (J2EE Connector Architecture) or Perl or whatever else.
  3. Re:The Wow Community by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't know Cobol, but it wasn't hard to understand.

    But boy would it be a royal pain to write!

    Encoding the message in that bizarre way made my eyes ache. I suppose you could, irony of ironies, use a Perl program to generate it automatically :-).

    D

  4. even Eclipse IDE by Felipe+Hoffa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't get it, but one of the official Eclipse projects is a COBOL IDE, including its debugger.

    http://www.eclipse.org/cobol/

    If you want it, go fetch it, its open source.

    Fh