Didier Kryn said on Mon, 11 Nov 2024 12:02:25 +0100

>     I understand you're talking about programs "installed" (with
>respect to "used") on your PC. But the applications which matter most
>for you and me aren't even installed on our PCs but in various
>industries, among which the one industry which runs the highest number
>of applications is the bank; and their applications are mostly written
>in COBOL, and you can trust them. I would change bank if I learned
>they were managing my account in PHP of Bash.

During the pandemic there was a scarcity of COBOL programmers, so I
re-studied COBOL using the GNU COBOL compiler. Unfortunately, the
scarcity was filled before I was proficient. I'll tell you one thing
though: I've always believed that COBOL was much better than its
reputation with the Pascal/C hipsters of the 1980's. My only beefs with
COBOL, and they're not showstoppers, are:

1. No local variables at the paragraph level.

2. No array bounds checking (but C doesn't have those either).

COBOL has its own indexed file system, so you can write real data
centered applications without all the login hassles of connecting to
Postgres/MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite, and you don't need to depend on tricky
SQL statements or learn the 1001 slight variations in SQL language.

Of course, COBOL isn't as fun as Ada, C, Lua, Python, and Turbo Pascal.
But fun isn't everything :-).

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com