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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)'s posts Post Back to profile
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Resuna

@ErikJonker @david_chisnall

My first job was programming in COBOL before it was legacy. It is terrible. It always was terrible. It's not a natural language, it's not ambiguous, but trying to make it look like a natural language was an unmitigated disaster at every level. The same is true of Perl's "linguistic" design. Even just pretending to be a natural language spawns monstrosities.

Edit: see also Applescript.

1 January at 14:50 | Wall-to-wall | Open on ohai.social
3 comments
Erik Jonker

@resuna @david_chisnall it is extremely stable and durable for sure, ask any financial institution 😃

1 January at 16:43 | Open on mastodon.social
jhannafin

@ErikJonker @resuna @david_chisnall OK, but that's not because of COBOL. You could write something durable and stable in any programming language. Financial software is written in COBOL because that was the language of the mainframe at the time. The fact that it's still largely in COBOL is because it's expensive to rewrite, the returns on a rewrite are hard to quantify, and the risks are huge.

1 January at 19:41 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
Resuna

@ErikJonker @david_chisnall

Have you ever written any code in COBOL? Everything in COBOL takes longer to write, the fundamental operations are simplistic and verbose, the program structure is stilted and restrictive, the way you define data structures is horribly antiquated, and a huge number of the problems that make writing COBOL so slow and painful are due to its mistaken "language like" design.

1 January at 20:39 | Open on ohai.social
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