programminglanguage:cobol

#c From a #cobol Perspective
▻https://hackernoon.com/c-from-a-cobol-perspective-444dc30554d6?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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I originally wrote this article for a print magazine in 1986. I was 23 and had been doing COBOL for four years, originally on punched cards. I’d started hearing about C and taught it to myself and rewrote a bit of COBOL into C (note, C is a terrible replacement for COBOL) and I wrote this as a primer to other COBOL programmers to get a taste of C. I updated the intro about 10 years ago for a blog post, but in the past 2 weeks I’ve ended up sharing it with a half dozen people who had no understanding of COBOL, simply so I could describe COBOL record structures to them, which I feel are quite powerful and not represented as well in most modern languages. This plays into a new language that I’m currently designing, so enjoy this blast from the past and learn about what your Grandparents (...)

#cobol-perspective #c-from-cobol #programming

How Fast Can Google #go Really Go?
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-fast-can-google-go-really-go-790be9fd515a?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3

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I started #programming in the 70’s as a teenager on both the good old TRS 80 with a cassette drive and the BASIC language and on an IBM mainframe with RPGII and #cobol. The TRS 80 was making an attempt at games, text based ones, but they were fun. For the real world we were using computers to batch process data and the languages were optimized for it. RPG (not to be confused with Role Playing Game) was super powerful but super odd, as it was totally optimized towards the 80 column punch card with as little effort as possible, while COBOL and BASIC were free format. Fortunately the number of installations of RPG and BASIC is relatively small these days, but what about COBOL and can it be replaced?According to reports, COBOL is still 70% of the installed software in the world and processes (...)

#google-go #golang

A first look at RPG: turns out it’s not only Role-Playing Games
▻https://hownot2code.com/2017/12/19/a-first-look-at-rpg-turns-out-its-not-only-role-playing-games

Many of you have heard about one of the oldest programming languages, COBOL, and you have also heard that COBOL programmers are much asked for nowadays to maintain old legacy code. There’s another old-timer which few know about and which is still in use and will be in use for quite a while for applications … Continue reading A first look at RPG: turns out it’s not only Role-Playing Games

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Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html

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Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.

The United States Department of Defense, the largest purchaser of computers at the time, set general guidelines for COBOL, including asking for “the maximum use of simple English” to “broaden the base of those who can state problems to computers.” Later, the Pentagon declared it would not buy or lease computers unless they ran COBOL.

Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer at Sperry Rand in the late 1950s, led the effort to bring computer makers together to collaborate on the new programming language. Ms. Hopper is often called the “mother of COBOL,” but she was not one of the six people, including Ms. Sammet, who designed the language — a fact Ms. Sammet rarely failed to point out. (Ms. Sammet worked for Sylvania Electric at the time.)

“I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,” she said. “But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.”

Ms. Sammet and the other five programmers did much of the new language’s design during two weeks of nearly round-the-clock work, holed up in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan. Their proposal was presented in November 1959 and accepted with few changes by the computer makers they worked for and the Pentagon.

#histoire_informatique

US government agencies still uses COBOL and 8" floppy disks to manage nuclear arsenal controlled by equipment from the ’70s

▻http://news.softpedia.com/news/us-still-uses-floppy-disks-to-manage-nuclear-arsenal-504561.shtml

Luckily, the DoD intends to upgrade, along with another system for crisis action planning and strategic mobilization, which uses somewhat newer technology, but which still runs on outdated versions (Windows Server 2008, 2009 Oracle 11g, programmed in Java).

Another agency that plans to upgrade is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which uses COBOL, a programming language from the ‘50s to manage a system for employee time and attendance.

[...]

Further, the Department of Treasury also employs low-level computer code (assembly language) developed in the ‘50s to manage the Individual Master File, a system that “is the authoritative data source for individual taxpayer accounts where accounts are updated, taxes are assessed, and refunds are generated during the tax filing period.”

The report: "Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems"

▻http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf

Ian Murdock - How I came to find Linux
▻http://ianmurdock.com/post/how-i-came-to-find-linux

I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I was a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawakened by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall semester (we were given the choice between COBOL and FORTRAN—which even in 1992 seemed highly dated—and I had picked COBOL because it seemed the more “business” of the two).

9 programming languages and the women who created them

►http://www.infoworld.com/article/2920296/application-development/9-programming-languages-and-the-women-who-created-them.html

– 1950 : ARC Assembly (Automatic Relay Calculator), Kathleen Booth
– 1955 : Address, the first to support indirect addressing, for the MESM computer, Kateryna Yushchenko
– 1959 : COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), Grace Hopper
– 1962 : FORMAC (FORmula MAnipulation Compiler), an extension of FORTRAN that was able to perform algebraic manipulations, Jean Sammet
– 1967 : Logo, for educational programming, Cynthia Solomon (et al.)
– 1974 : CLU, first language to support data abstraction and a precursor of OO programming, Barbara Liskov, the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in computer science.
– 1980 : Smalltalk, a graphical programming environment introducing the concept of garbage collection, Adele Goldberg (et al.)
– 1981 : BBC BASIC, a BASIC version for the Acorn BBC Micro, Sophie Wilson
– 1991 : Coq, a new implementation based on the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, Christine Paulin-Mohring (et al.)

#programming