How old does this make you feel?

[DaveB]

COBOL turns 50.

[Chantho]

COBOL turns 50.

I first encountered COBOL circa 1978. My first thoughts were "what a load of bollocks, so much inferior to PL/1" this was still my opinion in 1997 which was the last (let's hope so) time I was on an assignment which involved developing in COBOL.

[xoggoth]

PL/1 was better. BASIC/FORTRAN still much more ancient.

[OwlHoot]

Yup, PL1 was quite elegant in its way. At Prime Computer we used a trimmed down version called plp (in which much of Primos was written), although the OS group were moving towards Modula 2 for new development. You don't hear much about that language these days.

[Churchill]

Yup, PL1 was quite elegant in its way. At Prime Computer we used a trimmed down version called plp (in which much of Primos was written), although the OS group were moving towards Modula 2 for new development. You don't hear much about that language these days.

I developed a text based "Window" system as part of an "ESPRIT" project in Modula 2.

Pascal 1 - Modula 2

A lovely language!

COBOL - 50? Bloody hell, God bless you Grace!

[expat]

I first encountered COBOL circa 1978. My first thoughts were "what a load of bollocks, so much inferior to PL/1" this was still my opinion in 1997 which was the last (let's hope so) time I was on an assignment which involved developing in COBOL.

I did a Mandelbrot plotting program in COBOL, just for fun.

It wasn't fun.

[Drewster]

Yup, PL1 was quite elegant in its way. At Prime Computer we used a trimmed down version called plp (in which much of Primos was written), although the OS group were moving towards Modula 2 for new development. You don't hear much about that language these days.

Ahhhh Prime Computers.......
I spent some time with "Prime Information" and "Infomation Connections" and "Info/Basic"........ and a few 3rd Party variations... "SIMPLE" which was probably an Acronym of something.... basically it generated Info/Basic code that was a lot more verbose that even I could manage on a bad day.... then we went in a cut&pasted and variously cobbled in chunks of code to make it do what we really wanted..... the main problem being that it (SIMPLE) used 000's of common routines that were totally opaque to the coder and didn't "quite" do what was wanted... so basically it generated code that needed to be edited to remove all the "common routines" that had to be re-coded to comply with the spaghetti code..... talk about a "Crock of Tulip".......

Those were the days....