Ask HN: Has anybody right here discovered COBOL for enjoyable? How did it go?

Phil Tadros · September 12, 2023

2023-09-12 07:17:37

I had to deal with a bunch of mainframes in a previous job and tried to learn a bit of COBOL. One interesting thing I learned early on was that programs are almost never written exclusively in COBOL. The language isn’t Turing complete (by design), so a significant portion of a program’s logic will be captured in the JCL (Job Control Language) script that configures how the program will run and orchestrates multiple programs.

While much-maligned, what JCL (and software like CLISTs and REXX for interactive processing) brings to the table in the mainframe world is a STANDARD way for programmers to not only decouple code and the data resources the code will process, but also a wealth of other functionality, including job accounting, priority, job classes, network routing of jobs & resources, conditional execution, run-time library management, resource caps, output management, catalog management & file disposition, real temporary files, file versioning (GDGs), storage & device management including tape, procedures, includes, symbolic variables, checkpoint restarts, etc.).

In non-mainframe realms, while the good news is that there’s no JCL, the bad news is that individuals and companies have pretty much reinvented the JCL wheel over and over again, creating their own hodgepodge of unique, non-standard efforts to deliver smidgeons of similar functionality hacked together from a mix of shell scripting, environment variables, YAML, JSON, other config files, manual prompting, third-party libraries and software, and even hard-coding resources in programs.

Grass is always greener, as they say. 🙂

https://www-40.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pag…

I did an internship in 2009-2010 with a company who used MicroFocus “AcuCOBOL” to modernize a green-screen automotive dealership management system into a Windows GUI.

I wouldn’t say I did it for fun, but I did do it for the learning experience. My university was very invested in COBOL, and I had classmates who got offers much larger than mine to work for various finance companies in Wisconsin, so I had already learned the basics of language.

It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.

Migrating data files to new descriptors was always a stressful time. The equivalent of a database schema change, but you had to load the old files and rewrite in the new format largely manually.

The tooling we used felt dated, but worked well enough. Better than the tools we used in school.

I always used “Murach’s Structured COBOL” [1] as my primary reference. Carried that book just about everywhere during that time.

[1]: Murach’s Structured COBOL https://a.co/d/hONfFT7

> It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.

I think this is an often under-appreciated point — languages don’t live in isolation, but within a wider context of libraries, people using the language, and institutions and jobs with jobs that use the language.

As another example on this point — at my current job, for some reason much of the backend has been written in Haskell. Haskell’s a fine language, I actually really like many aspects of it. Our main product, however, is web based, a domain Haskell is completely able to handle on a technical level. In practice, though, it’s a poor fit, and I find myself constantly puzzling at all the odd, non-idiomatic ways web architecture has been set up, often in ways that make it very difficult to make things work well for the web. In many cases, this has been carried over into some questionable typescript as the backend programmers then had to also try and become frontend programmers.

None of these problems are because of Haskell the language or because the original programmers were bad programmers, but because their background, and the majority of the Haskell ecosystem, just isn’t really web-focused, and so conventions and assumptions most people who work mainly on the web take for granted they were unaware of or got wrong.

A language is more than just syntax and standard library, it’s part of a broader culture.

It’s on my list of languages to learn, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

My first job was supporting a custom application running in UniVerse on Solaris. It originally ran on a Prime mainframe and UniVerse was one of the ways you could run this type of software on a modern system. I really enjoyed working in the Pick MultiValue environment. In many ways, this was a NoSQL database from before NoSQL was a big thing.

I don’t work in this world anymore, but I’ve been playing with ScarletDME (a fork of OpenQM, another MultiValue database, from before they closed the source) and seriously enjoying it.

As a result of this first job I’ve got a special place for “old” programming languages/environments. My dream retirement job is to work for either the CRA or IRS supporting their old systems. Between the complexities of income tax and the old-school code that can never be retired I think I’d love it.

I was working with a bunch of COBOL programmers and learned the language as an act of solidarity. Wrote a basic API framework in it.

I really love it. I think there are a number of language features (like the memory handling) which have elements missing from a lot of modern languages.

I wouldn’t say I learned it “for fun”, but when my sister was in college (25 years ago) as a business information systems major (or something like that), she had to take a Cobol course so I learned enough of it to help her get through the class. Next semester, she told me she had to take a second Cobol class. I told her I was done with Cobol and she switched majors.

I messed around with it, thinking it seemed interesting and could be useful to know Just-In-Case. One thing I didn’t get, until I started messing with it, is that COBOL isn’t a general purpose language. There’s a whole category of things it just can’t do, and if you ask about it you’ll just be told “COBOL isn’t C”. There’s another set of things it’s really effective at, primarily transactions and large iterations.

Mess around with it if you want, sure. Just realize it’s a limited language with specific use cases and you’re unlikely to ever touch it outside of those, even as a hobby/”for fun”.

Ya, transactional processing of what I would consider simple and well defined data it’s what typically occurs with cobol at financial institutions. In this context the code has been around forever and all the ‘Oops we lost your money’ bugs have generally been purged from it’.

I read ‘Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)’ and the whole time I kept thinking that learning one of these old languages could be fun and would be a good side project. Would definitely be a lot of good projects to work on if you looked for them as paid gigs.

Yes, somewhat for fun and somewhat for work. There are online cobol fiddle environments that can help you. Data is stored in something like a c Union on a buffer, and the programming style is pre-procedural, sort of like a very easy assembly language. The language is very wordy, and there aren’t a lot of standard libraries.

It is ok for storing and updating records, but writing complex algorithms would be slow

Only very old editions of COBOL were pre-procedural. Not saying I would want to learn it “for fun”. The only fun I had was trying to calculate in Input/Output storage (must be treated as write-only…) or maybe the many ways you could format your numbers. Modern Cobol could even be bearable (while wordy) but the environment in which it is normally used absolutely not: JCL lacks any unixy feel and everything on OS/390 is it’s own special tool. Lucky if you even got DB2, not so lucky when having to do with VSAM…

There are lots of things that I would rather do for fun than program in COBOL.

I have programmed in COBOL on ICL and IBM computers. You don’t just program in COBOL, you need to learn SQL, JCL, TSO, CICS, etc. Maybe it is simpler with MicroFocus (or similar) COBOL on Linux, haven’t ventured there.

I took a course in my undergrad for fun. It’s an interesting design paradigm, all the code had a built in schema attached to it, if I recall correctly, which I’ve come to appreciate and find more interesting over time.

Using the AS400 was very interesting as well.

The problem about COBOL, for me, is it’s so specifically designed to fill a niche of business record processing, that I’d never use it for a side project. It’s too verbose, and too restricting.

I learned COBOL in college just to learn it, and I loved the verbosity of it. Verbosity was kind of the point: if you name your variables properly, you have self-documenting code.

Yes, the processing COBOL does is restricting, but then my first full-time programming job was two and a half years writing RPG II code. COBOL would have been an upgrade.

I’ve actually seen some of the COBOL that underpins these financial entities. Typically the code base and writing style has morphed into a number of nearly incompatible dialects over the decades it has ran at these places. I’ve never really learned enough about it to understand copybooks and the other functions/file types it has.

I’d add that with legacy codebase the hardest thing is to untangle the business logic buried in. Some of it is likely still the core of the business but not many people, if at all, clearly know it and the docs are often dated and no longer in sync with the code.

In one word – minefield!

I had a COBOL class in school and I enjoyed. At the time I didn’t think about it, but today it feels more like a DSL than a general purpose programming language.

This was exactly my experience.

I then got a short contracting gig when I needed some cash. It was good money – and I never wanted to do that kind of work again. The language has any number of deficiencies, that have been fixed by later languages. And as another commenter mentioned – the departments that use it have any number deficiencies, many of them political, that got them into this position.

It is not something I would recommend for fun.

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