What drew you to COBOL? Do you use the language on an everyday basis?
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Top comments (3)
The Information Systems degree plan at UTSA got me into COBOL. I had to take it as a class. That was 6 years before the Y2K bug that was going to end the world. Or at least the financial world for those companies still entrenched in Mainframes and COBOL. For me the language was more about typing than logic, having to create multiple versions of the same variables just so they could be worked on in different parts of the program. Most of my work was done in the '74 compiler on the VAX machine at UTSA. I did do some work in various other companies, pretty much all either involved in banking or insurance. The last work I did with COBOL was with a team that tried to use C to read a COBOL program and duplicate its logic in a new C program. The automation did about 80% of the work and the rest of the manual work took so long that you could have written the programs from scratch.
I did get to meet commander Grace Hopper when she gave a lecture in San Antonio in the 80's. She handed me a representation of nanosecond. it was a piece of wire showing how far electricity can travel in a nanosecond, I think it was about 14" long. She was a brilliant woman.
That is so epic. Thank you for sharing!
From Google: Light travels about 300,000 kilometers (or 186,000 miles) in one second. That means it goes about 30 centimeters — about one foot — in one nanosecond.
This is, presumably in a vacuum. In a wire it would not go as far.
That being said, It is a marvelous representation, which will stick in my mind, now, forever. Thanks. :-)