COBOL in 100 seconds

COBOL is the hottest programming language of 2020. Learn how it powers the world's mainframe computers in 100 seconds.

#cobol #compsci #100SecondsOfCode

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[mihallex]

"the reason you don't go beyond 72 is because it ensures your program is responsive on mobile devices " LOL

[Sean-rinp]

"It was developed over one hundred years ago in 1959"

[parzh]

The syntax error at the end of this tutorial is just golden

[NeroGming]

I am 30 years old and COBOL was the first Programming language I learnt in my company. I was a COBOL Programmer for nearly 10 years. Leaving that company and learning real programming languages was like a caveman entering a city in the 20th century

[tambolaking]

You literally learnt COBOL to teach COBOL to people who would never learn COBOL. Productive!

[deri]

0:08
Damn, I can't believe it's already 2059!

[TheHoratii]

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." - Edsger Dijkstra

[DaVince]

This programming language isn't just _for_ businesses, it _is_ a business. It has divisions and everything.

[crappycoder]

The ending killed me seeing those errors and then hailing that you can get humongous salaries due to this. 2am happenings.

[RageCage]

Why was this released not on April Fools lmao

[Paul_Wetor]

I made a living at it for forty years. The last place I worked is in their fifteenth year of a five-year plan to get off the mainframe. It's hard to justify spending tons of money to replace software with new software to do the exact same thing.
P.S. Columns 73-80 were intended for the program name on punched cards, 1 - 6 for sequence numbers, in case you dropped the deck. But after source code software came along, that wasn't needed.
P.P.S. COBOL was designed for basic business record-keeping done with batch processing (jobs that usually ran overnight). It was later adapted to handle online processing. Much of the business world still uses mainframes to do the work. Your bank probably has a modern looking front-end to display on your phone or browser, but it is still based on mainframe processes behind the scenes.

[armchairtin-kicker]

Having been educated in my college's computer science department, I held my nose and took a course on COBOL from the business department. That decision lead to recruitment as an intern programmer writing IMS COBOL and three months later as a full-time programmer. A few years later, I learned MVS macro-assembler language, spending a few years as a technical support analyst, eventually spending a nearly 30-years as a system software developer. Oh yes, I took that intern job writing COBOL in the summer of 1977.

Finally, computer languages have their strengths and weaknesses and COBOL's strength is report formatting.

[GirishKumar-giky]

"Program is RESPONSIVE on mobile devices", absolutely gold man XD

[herebtheend]

Cobol : 600 reserve words
Me: Ait Imma head out.

[peteraustin]

I wrote COBOL programs 35 years ago, some of them are probably still running. I take great pride in telling people that I write legacy software. There's nothing wrong with it, just a bit verbose.

[SEEMERIDECOM]

I had to take a year of programming in COBOL in high school. I went from getting straight A's in BASIC the year before to failing my first quarter of COBOL. I buckled down and got an A for the rest of the year. But I hated it. It was the only programming language where you would have to type in three to four pages of code to create a half page report. You compile your code and have three errors. Fix those three errors and get 97 errors on the next compile. I now have been programming professionally for 35 years and fortunately have not had to write one line of Cobol.

[steves]

As someone once wrote: There are two types of fool. The first says “This is old and therefore good”, and the other says “This is new and therefore better”

[fiskebent]

The amazing thing about COBOL is that there are no libraries to learn. So once you know the language, you know *everything*. That means that you get to code your own XML/Json parsers from scratch. In COBOL! It's awesome!

[Truttle]

COBOL: I'm going to have verbose syntax.
Also COBOL: I'm going to only let you have 72 characters per line.

[toastrecon]

Ha ha. Has to fit on a punch card? That's one way to enforce the style guide.