Quote of the week!

[Tricky]

from what I am reading here about the FD forums I am glad I have stayed away. For me Cody summed most of the posts in one word that still has me chuckling ... "commentards"!

To be fair, Cody has said that about El Reg commenters.

[Cody]

Some of the jerks on the FD forum aren't worthy of the honorific 'commentard' - they're merely worthy of dispatching to A&E!

[Cody]

The use of COBOL cripples the mind: its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offence.

Who do I sue, I wonder?

[spud42]

is that still being used?? last time i heard of COBOL was in uni back in 1979... lol

[Cody]

is that still being used??

Oh yes indeed!

In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code and 5 billion lines more being written annually.

[spud42]

In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code and 5 billion lines more being written annually.

thats 17 years ago! surely its mostly dead and gone by now???

[Tricky]

In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code and 5 billion lines more being written annually.

thats 17 years ago! surely its mostly dead and gone by now???

Try this link for an explanation to COBOL's longevity.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/12148

[spud42]

ok so cobol is still around and used.... i learnt fortran any use for that?

[cim]

Still probably in use in a whole load of legacy applications for much the same reasons, and also gets used (still) for research data processing by physicists, astronomers, etc. - though the younger ones will probably use something more modern nowadays (C and Python seem fairly popular with astrophysicists), there'll be plenty who learnt fortran ten, twenty, fifty years ago and still use it.

[Cody]

I learnt Fortran too - kinda!

[Cody]

Real Programmers don’t write in COBOL. COBOL is for gum-chewing dimwits who maintain ancient payroll systems. Real Programmers don’t write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks. They get excited over finite state analysis or nuclear reactor simulation.

[NigelJK]

IBM's answer to COBOL was RPG, and is still in use and there are plenty of people still programming in it. Can't remember when it started but was in the 70's it came to the fore. Some nice features of the IBM mid-range machines. Th OS for example is basically SQL based.

[ffutures]

A friend who was a programmer for Chase Manhattan saw the COBOL applications he worked on through several changes of computing platform, movement from one site to another, etc. etc. - they only let him take early retirement because they'd managed to get some younger programmers up to the same general level of expertise. He was still on call for emergencies for several years, until they were really sure that year 2000 really hadn't thrown up any nasty surprises.

[Wildeblood]

I wonder what will happen when aliens finally land on Earth and make contact / friends, and then discover that there's all these computer games where the whole point of them is to shoot aliens

[spud42]

Still probably in use in a whole load of legacy applications for much the same reasons, and also gets used (still) for research data processing by physicists, astronomers, etc. - though the younger ones will probably use something more modern nowadays (C and Python seem fairly popular with astrophysicists), there'll be plenty who learnt fortran ten, twenty, fifty years ago and still use it.

yep learnt it back in 1979 at university..... the only thing i remember was i wrote a program to multiply 2 matricies of 20x20 and did it in less than a foolscap sheet of paper.
wouldnt have a clue anymore though... my last commercial programming job was in Z80 machine code for the metal bending and cutting controllers we built. even that was 1988.. lol

i remember around 1990 a friend and i wrote a lotto database in turbo pascal... ha ha ha even got the list of past results from Golden Casket who ran it here in qld... think TATTS own it now...