<i>But to be fair this doesn’t really install COBOL on your computer. GnuCOBOL is a transpiler that parses COBOL and converts it to C before compiling it. This feels a bit like cheating.</i><p>This is curious statement, what is cheating about it? I suppose this person equates Cobol with mainframes, and wants the Real Experience. Hopefully the author doesn't go down the rat hole of setting up Hercules with a 1970's era version of MVS operating system, and tries to learn enough JCL to execute the compiler. That's truly a waste of time.<p>Besides, not all machines that ran Cobol were EBCDIC, there were (are) a lot of ASCII machines, including anything running GnuCobol. The key thing you're learning about with Cobol is fixed length files, and storage formats like Display, Zoned Decimal, Packed, and Binary.<p>Otherwise the article has some good links and solid history.<p>I personally think Cobol and the mainframe model of resource sandboxing has some things to teach us today, but few are interested.
> Despite the fact that virtually no one learns COBOL anymore<p>Is this true? I mean, I know coding boot camp programs aren't emphasizing in COBOL, but I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 2010 and was <i>required</i> to take a COBOL class. I asked our intern this year (also from UWP) and he confirmed that it's still a required course.<p>I did my first internship building an operations management system for auto dealerships using AcuCOBOL. Using COBOL, particularly when binding to a GUI, was painful.<p>edit: missed "aren't" in my second sentence.
I've been playing with GNU COBOL for fun, and while it implements a lot of the language, it lacks integration with external systems.<p>For example, you'd expect there to be a simple way to open a network connection. I mean, doing REST calls is one of the fundamental ways you communicate with other services these days. Well, GNU COBOL has no such libraries.<p>Another thing COBOL is famous for is good SQL integration. As far as I understand you have language-level integration with DB2 on the mainframes. Doing the same on Linux with Postgres would be nice, but there is no database integration at all. You're limited to flat files, whose names are hardcoded in the source code.
Only reason for cloud to be popular was IBM MAINFRAME is expensive. MIPS way of billing is complexer. The way things are going cloud is a going expensive. Blue metal still rocks.
COBOL is terrible to work in. I was forced to take it in my MIS program in the 90s. We had the option of taking COBOL II or C Programming. Easiest choice I ever made (C of course).<p>They touted how everyone would be able to get a job fixing Y2K bugs. All I could imagine was a job like Peter Gibbons. I wanted to work in future technologies, not those of yesteryear. Thank goodness the internet was taking off by the mid 90s, so it was easy to see where things were going.