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100 Years of Grace Hopper

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the beautiful-jumping dept.

theodp writes "Grab your COBOL Coding Forms and head on over to comp.lang.cobol, kids! Yesterday was Grace Hopper's 100th birthday, and many are still singing the praises of her Common Business-Oriented Language."

5 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed by davidwr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously. Learn some legacy skills, you'll need them to help your future employer maintain their legacy stuff or migrate it.

    COBOL programmers are retiring fast, in 5-10 years expect a mini-boom for this skill set as those who didn't migrate before Y2K decide it's finally time.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
    1. Re:Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed by novus+ordo · · Score: 2, Insightful
      "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence."
      -Edsger W.Dijkstra

      (when you mentioned 5-10 I just couldn't resist :)

      --
      "You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
    2. Re:Kids: Learn COBOL, stay employed by Cyberax · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I helped to maintain COBOL software.

      Yes, it works. And yes, it works because nobody dares to touch it. Besides, people who praise COBOL often forget that only a small fraction of COBOL code has survived. Most of the bad code has been replaced by code in another languages long ago.

      There are far better tools now: Java/C# for business logic, BPEL for orchestration, rule engines, SQL stored procedures to work with large amounts of data, etc.

  2. "amazing grace" indeed by deitrahs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    one of the few things i have on my "i love me wall" is one of her nanoseconds, framed with a letter from the admiral to my mother (whom she was trying to encourage into a career in computer science). now that i have a daughter of my own, who is already quite geeky herself, i counterbalance the pop culture effect with stories about women like grace hopper.

    more girls - and hell, more boys for that matter - need to learn about people like her.

  3. Re:Women by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It figures. One of the wordiest (is that a word?) programming languages was invented by a woman. Talk talk talk. :-)

    Men have Perl: a series of unintelligable grunts.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.