I "Love Headlines" Like This

Folowed by massive snark, of course.

Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL. This is one of several I have run across. It talks about this article: A RayCast FPS in COBOL.

The tone of voice is snark and derision … commemorative of Dijkstra’s comments so many years ago: “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.” And “with respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist. Most Computer Science Departments have opted for the latter easy way out.”

And Computer Science Departments lost out to the Business Departments tha trained the COBOL developers of the 1960s through into the early 1990s (at least). And vastly more software was developed by <sigh>Business</sigh> than those using ALGOL-derived Computer Scientific-ish languages.

Note that the PC generation weren’t all serious CS types. They had lousy languages and used what they could find. And they found Microfocus COBOL and some liked it. Don’t believe me, go take a look at Awesome-COBOL and all the things they found! It’s quite the collection!

Once GnuCOBOL (originally Tiny-COBOL then Open-COBOL) was released, the community had a free COBOL compiler and most developers switched to it ($).EvensomeoftheCOBOLproducthousesrecommendedtheswitch($).

GCC COBOL was not developed for that community. None of the PC/Linux compilers has been attractive enough to adopt. COBOLworx® will be offering technical support GCC COBOL and professional expertise as needed to help enterprise to move applications onto Open Platforms.