Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Programming a net new isolated Cobol may not be difficult for experienced programmer.

Difficulty (and/or downright hate, for many;) lies in

1. Ecosystem - obscure libraries rules and os that don't jive with posix-like mindset

2. Legacy code - having to dig into a ginormous monolithic program and figure out what some obscure pieces of code do, untouched and undocumented by anybody in your team, with ridiculous interdependencies and complexities.

So it tends to be more of "how hard is Cobol in this particular application for this specific client" :-/

View on HN

Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out how I’d actually learn.

Intern or junior-level in a COBOL environment, unfortunately. Like others are saying, the problem with COBOL isn't (just) the language itself, it's all of the decades of very delicate cruft that has grown up around it. COBOL-the-language is absurdly simple to the point of being a little brain-damaged; but you have to be able to work in an environment where there's really close coupling between COBOL and its host operating system, and where minor code changes can have unintended consequences in seemingly unrelated applications, and the database isn't transactional, and there's no version control, and...

apt search cobol found this.

  open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64
    COBOL compiler

Also, I was hoping to find COBOL on learnxinyminutes.com, but didn't :/

Open-cobol works, but be aware that it translates your source to C and then compiles that. If that doesn't matter to you, great!

There's also tiny-cobol[0], but the project is dead and it only targets x86-32.

[0] http://tiny-cobol.sourceforge.net/

That's not really going to give you a taste for what it's like to "do" COBOL in a real-world scenario. Realistically, no one is running COBOL on a modern Linux. They're running it on something like z/OS and there is so much utterly bizarre and incredibly tedious stuff you have to deal with on those mainframe OS's that you'll run away screaming. And that's not even mentioning the code itself, written over several decades and likely not well documented.

When I worked at IBM not TOO long ago there were times when I had to fix a bug in WebSphere that only manifested on z/OS or zLinux and those were hands down the hardest bugs to fix. And that was a relatively modern codebase, by mainframe standards.

My way of learning and exploring something new (to me) is to ignore the bizarre and tedious system specific stuff that you mention. I have never even seen COBOL code before. Toy programs that I can easily run on my own computer are more than enough to satisfy my casual (and short-lived) curiosity.

https://kurthaeusler.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/learning-the-m...

That's not entirely true, a lot of people have migrated across to, for example, Microfocus COBOL, which runs on Linux and Windows.

It is true that a lot of legacy COBOL apps are on mainframe.

However, not all - I've personally been dealing peripherally with COBOL on UNIX/Linux via IBM or MicroFocus compilers for decades - and it even works on Windows :-O

e.g.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server...

https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix

Reply on news.ycombinator.com