State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Chuck Guzis]

On 4/5/20 7:24 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:

> Yet another article loaded with BS denigrating COBOL.
> The product of a very flawed academic system that decided
> to destroy COBOL because its users refused to accept that
> academics know what's best for the industry.

COBOL was remarkable in several respects.  Structured records being one
of them. (FLOW-MATIC was actually a bit superior in that the record
structure information was separate from the program).  Strong data
typing was another one.

Grace Hopper did a remarkable job keeping the CODASYL show together,
long before ANSI took an interest in standardizing languages.

On the other hand, there's always PL/I--a language for everybody and
nobody.  Be ye FORTRAN, COBOL or Algol programmer, you can, like Burger
King, have it your way.  A co-worker from IBM once told me that the
original IBM PL/I committee was a band of misfits.

--Chuck