Cobol

[southrk]

anyone know COBOL or when the new standard is coming out?

[grasshopperbe]

well i got a year of evening classes to program in AcuCobol gt
but as far as i understood back then (a year or two ago) it s a pretty old language and is hardly used anymore(we got it because its supposed to be good to learn programming. i can be totally wrong off course, since i only heard it from my teacher back then.

[HackinCowboy]

Yea, Cobol isn't used much anymore. It was extremely popular when the whole Y2K situation was happening though. Most colleges though still offer classes in Cobol, but my personal experience with it hasn't been an enjoyable one. It's a very tedious language. Your fingers begin to hurt just writing a very simple a program.

[UncaDanno]

I beg to differ. COBOL is very much still in use in the enterprise environment. Corporations spent (and are still spending) very large coin to build those systems (in COBOL) and want to milk that cow for as long as possible.
That's why large corporations are spending a lot of time and money integrating their client/server and web-based apps with these enterprise systems. The front-end may look new, but the proven business processes have been developed over a period of several years. Executives hate to toss something that expensive.

I was at a client site recently and saw some COBOL code that was written 20 years ago still in use in some of the company's mission-critical systems. And we're talking "a large financial institution" here.

[grasshopperbe]

hehe yeah i saw a 'dilbert' episode (Y2K its called i believe) a little while ago where an 'ancient computer' called black betty runs their entire company. one of the charactars says ' its written in cobol' i learned that language in history class'.