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3 Open Source Projects For Modern COBOL Development (opensource.com)

Posted by timothy on from the just-use-the-php-wrapper dept.

An anonymous reader writes: While Grace Hopper's contributions to computing are remembered, celebrated, and built upon by her successors, COBOL itself is often dismissed as a relic of earlier era of computing. To a certain extent, that is true. Most of the COBOL being written today is for maintaining legacy code, not starting new projects. However, the language is still being updated, with COBOL 2014 being the most recent standard for the language, and there are still plenty of opportunities to apply for jobs that require COBOL experience. In an article on Opensource.com, Joshua Allen Holm highlights three open source projects that are keeping the language alive.

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Keep COBOL alive??? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How about instead we pound a wooden stake through its heart, burn the body, salt the ashes, apply holy water, weld it into an iron urn covered with runes and annointed with the boold of seven virgins and bury it at a crossroads under a full moon?

  2. don't knock it unless you've tried it by hmadrone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I had the typical ignorant disdain of COBOL until I actually worked with some. Over a short period of time, I developed respect for the language and for the disciplined, methodical programmers who wielded it. We could learn much from reading old COBOL programs, particularly for web forms, where a modern form of COBOL would be a lot more readable and maintainable than the krufty PHP and JS that infests the web.

    One small example is the COBOL institution of edit masks, which were invaluable for handling form input and output of things like phone numbers and credit card numbers. COBOL's edit masks were simple to use, readable and understandable, and powerful enough to cover common business cases. No modern web language has anything that approaches COBOL's elegance in this area, which is why entering your credit card on a web site is slow and tedious.