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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."

3 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Women by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    I couldn't resist.

    1. 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.
  2. It is very tough to find good COBOL people now... by Panaqqa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The university I went to stopped teaching it about 20 years ago, and most programmers of COBOL with much in the way of practical real world development experience retired long ago. In fact, a lot of them came out of retirement for a few months or a year prior to Y2K because the money offered was so good.

    Today, there are still COBOL jobs advertised, and they largely go unfilled. It could have something to do with the fact that there are so few people remaining with the skills, and something to do with the fact that many of them are with banks who are notoriously cheap on IT salaries. The few remaining good COBOL people on the market go into contract positions that usually begin at about $70/hour. I kid you not.

    It's a lot of typing, writing COBOL, and the code is at times boringly simple, but if someone is out of work and seriously looking for an IT position, learning it would not hurt. I predict there will still be some call for it 20 years from now.