

New IDEs make working in COBOL as easy as C#, VB or Ruby. - nerds-central
http://knol.google.com/k/alex-turner/visual-studio-cobol/2246polgkyjfl/8#

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create_account
That title ("Visual Studio COBOL") reminded me of the less-serious "Cobol on
Cogs" site: <http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM>

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nerds-central
I love that site. They way it flickers and has screen burn effects are so
kitch :)

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bond
Here's a word i haven't heard in a long time... In those days we chose to
learn Clipper over Cobol, each CL would take 2-3 minutes to compile on a 8086
processor. Now it takes less than 1 sec to do it, lol

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nerds-central
How is Clipper doing these days? COBOL is making a resurgence as people
realise it works!

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larrywright
While this might make the actual process of typing in the code easier, it
doesn't make the language any better. I still can't imagine choosing to use
COBOL over using Ruby or even C#.

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nerds-central
The point is that there is a lot of COBOL already out there, so someone has to
maintained it and add to it. What is more, C# is not a perfect language for
business its self, neither is Ruby. With good tooling the difference are
small. Actually, in my case I would never recommend using Ruby for a
commercial project - but that is another discussion for another time :)

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larrywright
There's been a lot of ruby code written on commercial projects, I think the
developers (and customers) would disagree with that.

I also think you're way off on the amount of difference between C# and COBOL.
The fact that COBOL _requires_ good tooling to be usable is telling in and of
itself.

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philwelch
How much COBOL is there still out there?

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nerds-central
Billions of lines of COBOL will 10s or even 100s of millions of lines written
every year. Each time someone makes a mobile phone call, uses a credit card,
books an airline ticket - 99% chance COBOL will handle part of that
transaction.

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jsmcgd
It would be good if Micro Focus released an Eclipse plugin too.

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nerds-central
They do... Hopefully there should be a community knol on that as well in the
near future.

