The language is not interesting at all without the ecosystem, which is this fully flushed alien alternative universe of computation. If you want to dive into COBOL, don't try to run it on x86, get yourself a mainframe account.
Do not know about our competitors but you can run our product for free on a raspberry pi if you just want to play around.
With microfocus JCL become bash scripts and have similar tools to mainframe. Unsure if lzlabs translates jcls.
My favorite unanswered question when someone told me take the 70.000 component core banking to cloud is “ok, on which language you can assure will run in 10-15 years?” As that’s the bare minimum the new CBS has to last.
If we had followed the crowd, we would have built it as microservices, then as event-driven architecture, then as Mini-monoliths, on auto generated Java that turns one cobol program into an object but is not designed as an OO platform…
I understand companies should not be tied to the past but running off a precipice full speed on is not smart either…
Perl 5.
Also consider that Linux allows more flexible IPC so some batch can be simplified dramatically
There's a lot of very cool and technically interesting stuff to explore on the platform. Tons of great computing history, you really feel a bit like you are peering back in time going decade by decade as you move inward towards the core of the operating system. It's helpful to remind yourself that it's a direct descendent of the first successful commercial virtual memory implementation, and the core of the operating system has pieces that predate that. You can see the outlines of the world before that and how things adapted afterwards, how the modern process model slowly evolved out of DAT and time sharing, how things were handled in a fully vertically integrated system before the concept of device drivers was fully realized. How batch led to time sharing and transaction monitors and how all of that slowly turned into the web. And of course all the different tricks programmers used to be productive in that kind of a world.
It's impossible to fully realize all that we take for granted in modern computing when you haven't seen any of that.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people that work on mainframes never get to see that side of things.
The screen isn't treated as an infinite-scroll dot matrix printer, it's treated as a... as a very old visual text editor, with stencil masks, I guess.
The UI is very unified by alien conventions.
Files are not files, they are record stores.
There's a weird batch language that you use for everything.
If you're not writing a batch program, you'll be writing on top of CICS, which is a framework for, uh, realtime message processing programs and GUIs.
The DBs have their own idiosyncrasies. Etc' etc.
I’ve heard of some of the other stuff before, but I’d be very interested in hearing more about how this works!
Is there something that I'm missing ?
It resembles a combination of every Microsoft component (IIS, SQL), alongside dozens of separate proprietary products that are a fever dream of products to do simple tasks like write "files" to disk.
The emulator itself isn't the issue, it's the OS.
> OK, COBOL-ON-COGS was funny, but why not try that for real? ;)
And alliteration.
I think there was also COBOLSCRIPT (sp) a few years ago, which, IIRC was a COBOL -> JS converter.
Some discussion from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6950646
A new version of the COBOL ISO standard was released this year (January 2023)
A brand new stable release 3.2 of the free open-source compiler GnuCOBOL was released this summer (July 2023)
OCamlPro is working on SuperBOL, a COBOL LSP (Language Server Protocol) for Vscode, written in OCaml...
