
COBOL on Wheelchair - tartle
http://azac.pl/cobol-on-wheelchair/
======
malandrew
I'm usually not one to get offended and and I'm not going to say the author is
horrible person like some jerks around here that get offended by non-PC stuff,
but it comes across as possibly a tad offensive to use a wheelchair as a jab
at Ruby on Rails. I know it's a play on Cobol being old, but a lot of people
confined to wheel chairs are young, in the prime of their life and extremely
capable in other areas of their areas of expertise. Anyways, I leave it to the
author to think whether or not this has merit, because it's not really my
place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself.

TBH I was expecting this to be about someone actually hacking on the cobol
that runs their wheelchair.

~~~
aaronem
> it's not really my place to judge since I'm not in a wheelchair myself

Yet you do a sterling job of not letting that hold you back for an instant.

~~~
malandrew
It is possible to perceive something as likely to offend many without being
offended yourself. I'm neither judging, nor offended, but simply stating that
the choice of diction here is likely to be hurtful to others. It is not
necessarily judgement to speculate on likely outcomes from actions and words.

That being said it is my place to judge you as a pedantic troll that lowers
the quality of the discourse here. Furthermore, it is the place of everyone
else to judge this comment of mine as one deserving of downvotes since my
previous sentence makes it as useless to everyone here as your statement.

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antimora
Though I get the name, I wish it was named something other "on wheelchair". It
feels a little degrading. Other than this, it's a nice conceptual work.

~~~
V-2
Degrading in what sense? For Cobol or for wheelchair users?

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vezzy-fnord
Oh damn, the aspirations of COBOL on Cogs are now a reality?

I call shotgun on "Why You Should Use COBOL on Wheelchair Instead of Ruby on
Rails For Your Startup".

~~~
oinksoft
Introducing the CRAP (COBOL-RPG-Apache-PL/SQL) stack. Consulting available and
a book on the way.

~~~
msh
Make a CRUD app with CRAP!

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bliti
I thought that was PHP's sales pitch. Zing!

~~~
krapp
Don't be silly. PHP's sales pitch is "at least it's not Perl."

~~~
aaronem
Perl's pitch, meanwhile, has lately been "at least it's not PHP."

I know who's winning that fight, in terms of share, but I'm not sure who I
think more deserves to lose it.

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was_hellbanned
This was both humorous and interesting. The people complaining about the
wheelchair aspect need to stop and think about their own projections around
the word "wheelchair".

~~~
qbrass
I don't like it because the lack of alliteration makes it a less catchy name.

I reckon it's the real reason responsible for Ruby on Rails recognition.

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mcfist
"The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the
assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand
languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin
and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it."

but very nice graphics )

~~~
wglb
_But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it_

This was my motto until i did a year or so consulting in RPG-III.

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Nimi
I have to wonder: there are _very_ competent "old technology/mainframe"
programmers. They debugged complex programs using very primitive tools when we
were all in diapers. Obviously, there are also very mediocre old programmers,
but for the sake of this discussion, consider the best practitioners of their
generation.

How is it that they mostly find themselves stuck in horrible jobs, maintaining
legacy software on their old platforms? Surely, for a programmer with
experience in assembly and Basic (as an example), becoming proficient in most
modern languages shouldn't be a problem. But I strongly suspect that even the
minority of the old programmers who bother learning a new language, can't find
employment utilizing their new knowledge. Any thoughts?

~~~
memracom
Lots of these guys learned new languages like C aeons ago and have since moved
to Java, Scala, Python, etc. The folks who are stuck maintaining legacy COBOL
apps are there because they want to be there. The very competent people
quickly learn how to use new tools, but can still deep dive and find bugs
related to memory leaks and race conditions when it is needed. At the same
time, these old guys are likely to demand that everyone around them use TDD so
that they don't introduce that kind of bug in the first place. Case in point,
Uncle Bob.

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marktangotango
Cobol and some of the Basics had a characteristics that made them very
desirable for certain use cases. Namely, static memory allocation. Although
you can dynamically allocate memory in Cobol, you generaly don't. All storage
is statically allocated at program startup. This would be highly desirable if
you wanted to allow third parties to execute arbitrary code on your server.
That plus no recursive function calls ensures stack and heap safety.

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wooptoo
Beats the hell out of DOS on Dope
[http://dod.codeplex.com](http://dod.codeplex.com)

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ErikAugust
I should put up a repo for my "QBASIC Gone Quixotic" project.

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Roboprog
Love the logo & name.

Whatever the downsides are, I'm guessing memory leaks aren't among them :-)

(given that the DATA DIVISION is fixed size, unless there are significant GNU
extensions)

~~~
bitwize
The logo was done in the font Glass Tty VT220 -- which, fyi, also makes a very
nice terminal font for your command line. (In fact, I have yet to see anything
that matches it.)

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static_typed
The fact is COBOL is still used, and useful today, all these decades later. I
wonder what the sentiment about Ruby on Fails will be in thirty years time,
and I don't think we will still be using it.

~~~
Mikeb85
Ruby will still be used years from now. Rails, probably not, but Ruby is a
good language in its domain (scripting, dynamic languages).

~~~
dopamean
I'm pretty new to Ruby and I'm already sick of people equating Ruby and Rails
though I understand how it happens.

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derleth
I'm waiting for FORTRAN on Steam Engine.

~~~
rhizome31
Not a microframework, but a friend of mine committed this:
[http://freecode.com/projects/cgi77](http://freecode.com/projects/cgi77)

