from Hacker News

The First COBOL Bootcamp

by dy on 4/1/17, 5:49 PM with 21 comments

  • by tekkk on 4/1/17, 10:42 PM

    "Hello COBOL Cutting Edge Computer-Age Classic"

    000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

    000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.

    000300

    000400 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

    000500 CONFIGURATION SECTION.

    000600 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.

    000700 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.

    000800

    000900 DATA DIVISION.

    001000 FILE SECTION.

    001100

    101200 PROCEDURE DIVISION.

    101300

    101400 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.

    101500 DISPLAY "Hello world, I'm back!"

    101600 STOP RUN.

    If this ain't april fools joke lord have mercy on us.

  • by ams6110 on 4/1/17, 11:03 PM

    Someday people will be posting similar Javascript jabs on April 1 and laughing about how people could ever have had serious jobs working with such a ridiculous language.

  • by nicolethenerd on 4/1/17, 11:08 PM

    In case people are confused - the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy is a real bootcamp. They do not teach COBOL - that's the April Fool's joke.

  • by nevi-me on 4/1/17, 10:20 PM

    This is interesting. I think 2020 is an achievable number.

    I'm an accountant by profession, and since I program; I got thrown into a project at work where we had to reverse-engineer COBOL code to figure out what the banking system was doing. It was a painful exercise by today's standards as the code was badly written, but we pulled through.

    There was a script of a few thousand lines, which calculated interest on most of the cheque and investment products. It had the "here be dragons" disclaimer. After defeating the dragons, I asked if I could add "dragon slayer was here", but that wasn't going to happen, so I made it my pinned tweet (@nevi_me).

    I wonder if it would be worth my while to join the bootcamp and learn COBOL properly.

  • by adrianratnapala on 4/1/17, 11:10 PM

    I thought this was going to be a historical article about some training camp Admiral Hopper arranged for swabbies who needed to learn COBOL.

    Or at least for swabbies who needed to learn programming and were going learn COBOL because the way admiralty works.

  • by yomly on 4/1/17, 10:52 PM

    Given that I've heard day rates as high as £2000 for a CIVIL engineer, this would be great if it is a real thing. Alas, the timing of the post suggests otherwise...

  • by Immortalin on 4/1/17, 10:19 PM

    This is not satire right?

  • by goatlover on 4/1/17, 11:01 PM

    What, no mention of moving the mainframe to web assembly?

  • by PretzelFisch on 4/2/17, 12:14 AM

    what is the significances of 2020 in COLBOL? Given the 2038 issue COLBOL may again become in high demand.

  • by ape4 on 4/2/17, 2:16 AM

    cobol would be much nicer if it accepted camelCase.