
Jean Sammet, co-creator of COBOL, has died - andrewbinstock
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html
======
StevePerkins
I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC
industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like
the writers sacrifice historical plausibility to create strong female leads
for a contemporary audience.

Ironically, so many of the GIANTS of computing's earliest days were female.
Even at the rank-and-file level, women made up an astonishing number of early
programmers. If you talk to retirement age people in our field, you'll find
that mainframe developers were commonly female all through the 1960's and
1970's. It wasn't until the PC revolution that the field shifted to become
more exclusively male.

I wonder when we'll see writers and TV/film producers start to explore that
period of history? I'm sure there are some amazing stories that could be told.
The crazy thing is, even if you just presented the field as-is without any
embellishment, most people would assume that you were re-writing history in
the name of political correctness. Most of the general public (hell, most
young professionals in our field) just has no idea about this.

~~~
pacaro
My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my
father — at the time married with four children. They were married in
September 1969, a month before my brother was born.

I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two
programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the
same thing

~~~
eleumik
probably not the only ones but the first I hear of, you and your brothers also
programmers ?

~~~
pacaro
My older brother is an IT manager, I'm a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my
sister has worked variously in real estate, finance, and education.

Of my four half-brothers, I believe that two work in the industry (we're not
close). One certainly wrote a book on X programming before I even knew what X
was!

~~~
eleumik
fantastic ;-)

------
maxharris
Dijkstra said it best in 1975:
[https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD498.html)

And before you get angry at me, answer this simple question: have you actually
ever used COBOL? I spent a year of my life translating a COBOL mess into
Delphi. It was horrible - the code I was working with had no functions (unless
you think of a module defined in an entire file as a function), global scope
on variables, and tons of ugly COBOL boilerplate, as dictated by the language.

And it's no surprise that COBOL was a historical dead-end. Unlike FORTRAN and
Lisp, it begat nothing.

That's why I'm hard-pressed to venerate anyone that had anything to do with
perpetuating that mess.

~~~
nn3
>Unlike FORTRAN and Lisp, it begat nothing.

Which programming language was begat by FORTRAN? The ALGOL family seems rather
independent to me.

Both FORTRAN and COBOL had the misfortune to be created before structured
programming. Others, like FORTH and LISP were lucky that they are flexible
enough to easily add new programming conventions.

You could probably say that modern report generators were begat by COBOL to
some degree (even though FORTRAN had formatted output too)

It seems programming languages designed to be "easy to use" suffer from lots
of people writing really terrible code with it. Excel or VB have similar
issues.

~~~
greglindahl
Since Fortran had a large amount of existing code soon after it was invented,
the standards committee has always tended to add new features to Fortran after
other languages had already tried them out and perhaps discovered pitfalls.

From my experience working on compilers, the thing Fortran begat the most was
advanced compiler optimization algorithms, which then trickled down into C and
C++.

~~~
nn3
That's true for COBOL too.

FORTRAN compilers were great for loop optimizations, but not clear if it
pioneered much else worthwhile.

~~~
willtim
FORTRAN pioneered expressions which were used in addition to statements. This
was huge. Modern languages are still expanding on the idea of programming with
expressions (especially functional languages).

------
EamonnMR
Her work on the History of Programming Languages conference is enlightening.
Good reading if you can get a hold of it.

[http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html](http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html)

~~~
WalterGR
_Good reading if you can get a hold of it._

Many public library systems have inter-library loan arrangements with
universities. This is a great way to get access to research works like the
HOPL proceedings.

(I live in Montgomery County Maryland and just checked to see if I can get
them via my local public library branch. Yup.)

------
nooyurrsdey
She had a large impact on modern business. My own mother works in IT and
writes COBOL for a living.

Thanks for your contribution, Mrs. Sammet

------
Pxtl
I guess it says something sad about my prejudices that I saw the name "Jean"
and assumed it was a man's name. I forgot that the field was so much more
inclusive of women back then.

~~~
ams6110
I would assume "Jean" to be a woman and "Gene" to be a man.

~~~
Pxtl
I was thinking French. I kept seeing notable programmers with female-sounding
names like Jan and then realizing it was a non-Anglophonic man's name that's
spelled like an English woman's name.

------
atemerev
Cobol's legacy lives as PL/SQL, ABAP, and other enterprise data handling
languages. While everybody is quick to point that this is not "real
programming", they required astonishing amounts of engineering efforts to make
things work.

I would love to see a decent, modernized COBOL -- the same way they have
modernized Fortran, so it is now a pretty decent numerical computing language.
It would be a great hit.

~~~
johnhattan
COBOL has been "modernized" quite a few times, but the syntax still looks
pretty archaic, most likely to avoid breaking too much existing code. I'm sure
backward compatibility is of paramount importance for it.

I saw that there's a version that compiles to .NET bytecode, so you could
conceivably write an XBox game in COBOL.

~~~
Stratoscope
Visual COBOL:

[https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-
cobol/](https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/)

Compiles to native code, JVM bytecode, or MSIL (.NET).

------
rory096
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14437092)

------
smarks
Although Ms. Sammet's passing has been previously discussed here on HN, this
new NYT article provides a different and somewhat more colorful perspective on
the life of this remarkable woman. Worth a read.

------
breck
Her book "Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals" is not available as
an eBook and is out of print and costs over $100 used on Amazon. Would be
great if there was a cheaper way to read it.

~~~
smarks
Coincidentally I had bought this book from abebooks.com just a couple weeks
before Ms. Sammet's passing. I looked again just now, and there are a few
copies available for less than $100. However, the prices seem rather higher
than they were when I bought my copy.

------
edtechdev
She proposed natural language programming over 50 years ago.
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365274)

There still hasn't been a whole lot of progress, although there have been some
research projects and some closed source applications like Inform7 and
WolframAlpha.

~~~
mindcrime
_although there have been some research projects and some closed source
applications like Inform7 and WolframAlpha._

Just as an FYI, Inform7[1] is - according to Wikipedia anyway - available
under the Artistic License[2].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License)

~~~
rsaarelm
The most interesting part that translates the natural language Inform 7 code
to the more traditional Inform 6 code has not been open sourced. Graham Nelson
talked about wanting to release the code as literate programs[1]. Currently
the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component is "as of
April 2009, about two-thirds done"[2].

[1]: [http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/](http://inform7.com/sources/inweb/)
[2]: [http://inform7.com/sources/webs/](http://inform7.com/sources/webs/)

~~~
mindcrime
_Currently the status of the publishable release for the ni compiler component
is "as of April 2009, about two-thirds done"_

Blimey. :-( Here's hoping it sees the light of day at some point!

------
ninjakeyboard
Black-bar worthy?

------
cobol9999
Jean Sammet- Your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered.
I really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT
[https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-
certificates/gene...](https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-
certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/) www.sc-digital-
engineering.com

------
cobol999
Janet your contribution to Software Industry will always be remembered. I
really love Cobol. We developers salute to you. RIP Sr. Vice President - IT
GIIM [https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-
certificates/gene...](https://www.globaliim.com/32-it-management-
certificates/general-management/ngiimic-chandresh-jain/) www.sc-digital-
engineering.com

------
nthcolumn
COBOL was a foundation language in CS101 30 years ago and it was outdated
then. There were jobs in legacy COBOL. Probably still are. It sucked but not
as hard as RPG II.

------
stesch
DISPLAY SPACES UPON CRT.

------
killin_dan
No black bar? There's billions of lines of COBOL throughout the world.
BILLIONS!

------
martincmartin
HN should have a black bar in honor of this.

~~~
alpb
She passed away May 21, which is 2 weeks ago, so this is not exactly news I am
afraid.

------
jxub
To like COBOL, you need to posess a particular kind of rigid corporate
mindset. I wonder whether it's fathers/mothers had the mentioned physic
structure, or it was a fruit of 50's salaryman mental subjugation. No offense
ment.

~~~
DanBC
Or was it a product of the computers at the time?

Here's a 1959 computer, donated to a school in 1965. This was filmed in 1969.
One of the children wrote a language - minigol - so the younger children
didn't have to use assembler.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1DtY42xEOI)

Just turning the machine on requires coordination between several people using
intercom.

~~~
coreyp_1
Thank you for the video! It was interesting to see the binary adding exercise!

------
maxharris
"I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with
dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol,
for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual
descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language."

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html)

~~~
intopieces
What is this point of this quote? I downvoted this comment because it does not
contribute to the discussion. A common tactic is to post a quote, wait for
people to refute the most common/charitable interpretation of the quote's
meaning in the context of discussion, then to reply with "that's not what I
meant" and end it satisfied.

So tell us, what is the point of bringing up this quote?

~~~
moxious
Poster isn't biting on this request. Somewhat ironically the quote is sourced
from an article about a disfavored language arguing why cobol should be a
disfavored language.

Engineering is subject still to styles and fads, I guess the quote is just
furthering that general mentality. COBOL isn't "cool" whatever that should
mean.

------
rams
Fred Brooks on COBOL - [https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-
cobols-...](https://cycle-gap.blogspot.in/2009/08/fred-brooks-on-cobols-
success.html)

