[HN Gopher] IBM releases COBOL compiler for Linux x86
___________________________________________________________________
IBM releases COBOL compiler for Linux x86
Author : belter
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-04-07 22:38 UTC (21 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www-01.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www-01.ibm.com)
| d_silin wrote:
| The lack of comments vs position on front page is intriguing.
| msgilligan wrote:
| There's nobody here (besides maybe me) old enough to have
| anything to say.
| d_silin wrote:
| Well, I worked with COBOL developer team in Canadian bank a
| few years ago. It is absolutely alive and well in this
| industry.
| momothereal wrote:
| The post just went up, people are still writing their
| insightful essays on their experience with COBOL, what this
| means for the future of the language, and speculating as for
| the reason IBM is porting their compiler to Linux. Can't wait!
| msgilligan wrote:
| I expected it to be Open Source, but it is not.
|
| I had a few jobs where I programmed in COBOL when I was in
| college. Its probably just as well that it's not Open Source,
| because I was tempted to install it just for fun.
| [deleted]
| kazinator wrote:
| > Memory requirements are as follows:
|
| > Minimum 250 MB for product packages
|
| > Minimum 2 GB of hard drive space for paging
|
| > Minimum 512 MB for temporary files
|
| > Minimum 2 GB RAM, with 4 GB more optimal
|
| Ouch; this ain't your grandpa's lean and mean Cobol.
| ajross wrote:
| I'm just imagining the level of jaw dropping and brain exploding
| that would have gone on had that same headline been published in
| 1998.
|
| Obviously at this point almost three decades into the internet
| era no one really cares. We all know that "somewhere" old COBOL
| code is running, but in practice the companies managing the bulk
| of data for society didn't even exist before Y2K. Everyone with
| unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java
| code instead.
|
| But... yeah. Linux is now an _official_ heir to the S /360. We've
| made it. Finally.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to
| really bad Java code instead.
|
| I can assure you that's not correct, as I work in an enterprise
| that has plenty of unmaintainable COBOL still running, though
| they've supplemented it with lots of really bad .NET code more
| recently.
| busterarm wrote:
| > Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to
| really bad Java code instead.
|
| Sadly this is entirely untrue. What's happening in practice is
| they're still running COBOL and they're paying some woefully
| underpaid and underappreciated developers to write PHP ("Zend
| Core") for System-i.
|
| This allows companies to run web applications on these aging
| systems.
| usbline wrote:
| Releases? It's not released yet.
|
| >Planned availability date: April 16, 2021
| api wrote:
| Revive this?
|
| http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
| aparsons wrote:
| COBOL will always have a soft spit in my heart as the first
| programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years
| max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were
| some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract,
| artistic sense.
|
| COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even
| the default. But some of these programmers (not including myself
| back then admittedly) just wrote code that came together
| beautifully like a jigsaw puzzle. I'm sure if given a C++ or
| other language with modern features, they could do amazing
| things. This was before a time when Clean Code (capitalized on
| purpose) and such were in the zeitgeist. I didn't appreciate the
| full beauty of these modular, generalized, programs until a
| decade or more later.
|
| I also didn't realize that Z systems natively ran Linux. Must
| have missed that news. I suspect they'll open source this soon -
| makes a lot of sense, if only for keeping consistency with their
| C/C++ work on Z systems. They are a big contributor to L.L.V.M in
| that area.
| keyle wrote:
| > supports one of the following operating systems
|
| Redhat and Ubuntu.
|
| Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available
| for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours?
|
| I guess it's fair, a debian and rhel base would cover "most" use
| cases.
| theodric wrote:
| 'Ordering information' Yeah, IBM is still IBM.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-07 23:00 UTC)