• Papamousse@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      4 months ago

      I learnt COBOL (I’m old) it’s a very easy language, you basically talk, for instance to do c=a*b you write:

      MULTIPLY A TO B GIVING C

      and everything is tabbed, but in a good editor like emacs, it’s done automatically pretty well.

      • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        I was looking into learning COBOL some years ago, because i found that verbosity interesting.

        And it seemed like there’s not many libs and toolboxes out there, compared to the major languages that has libs for everything, so I couldn’t really use it for small projects.

        • connaisseur
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          4 months ago

          The issue with COBOL surely isn‘t about the language itself. The real challenge will be to decipher the spaghetti code that was created at a company in the last sixty or so years. And then to dare changing something without breaking the program as a whole.

          • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            4 months ago

            That’s easy you just use the huge number of test cases to ensure against introducing new bugs.

            /S