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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Programming
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oh the names aren't long. cobol has keyword alternatives for all operators and all numbers up to 20. since the language was designed for non-programmers, code in the wild follows no paradigm and mixes these alternatives freely. names are usually kept as short as possible.
there's also a lot of boilerplate required for each file wrt the actual structure of the sections, assembly style. sure most of this can be automated with tooling but there's no tooling available. the cobol people have mainly worked in their own sphere and not been included in the tooling explosion of the last 15 years.
here's an example of some well-written cobol. most of it is nowhere close to this consistent, or source-controlled for that matter.
keyword count is a quick but bad metric of language complexity. thanks to all the alternative syntaxes cobol allows, it has around 300 keywords.
What would scare me the most is the bad tooling. I do rely on my tools to search for references, etc. I wonder if it's even possible to write a good analyzer for COBOL. Verbose operators and literals wouldn't scare me at all.
Still would jump at the chance. It would have to be remote and I would strongly prefer being the only engineer touching the code.
you're not going to get a position remote if your client is a bank or some other entity that does cobol. that shit is running on an airgapped machine running a vm of a machine from the 90s running a vm of a machine from the 70s. if you're really unlucky the source will be on punch cards because they didn't invest in a machine with storage and asked the VM developers for the same workflow as before
True most COBOL is in person only. At least from what Ive seen. Big detriment but most systems are on physical computers...so gl!