Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing the story of your developer mom - a very cool mother to have!

COBOL is not a "cool" language, but mainframes have been around long enough to be "retro cool" now, and most run Linux at least as an optional OS under some virtualization (IBM Z).

As a doctoral candidate in the noughties, I purchased a book about FORTRAN due to its "retro-coolness" and read it, and eventually took on a short university gig to earn the money that the book cost back, tutoring architects/engineers in FORTRAN 95 for a bit, which was fun; to date, I could not bring myself to do the same with COBOL, though, or not yet.

Because it is so verbose, if I had to use it I would probably write in another language and transpile to it.

My university still has books that are from that era. A book from 1975 about teaching yourself FORTRAN IV, one from 1980 about learning IBM 370 assembly, a book from the 60s called LISP 1.5 primer. These books are still old enough to be "retro cool," and these books are old enough that they'd likely be expensive to buy (though most books are more like from the late 80s and 90s, not as old as these). It seems cool to me, although a greater selection of newer books would be nice.

I've probably touched on this before, but back in the 1980s, absolutely none of the computer courses I took ever even so much as touched an IBM mainframe. I almost got the impression that there was an effort not to teach them.

On the other hand, you could expect to learn a new operating system every year. Oh, we don't use DEC gear at this school, check out our spiffy Prime running PRIMOS. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My first jobs in the late 80s/early 90s were COBOL programming. At my second one I finally convinced the management to put me onto the tools team who wrote the code generators for the '4GL'.

One of the things I did was write a COBOL pre-processor (in C) to allow re-use of code and variables so the variables looked like locals rather than globals.

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