Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun? How did it go?

Honestly, I downloaded https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucobol/ and read a tutorial but didn't go further.

I did an internship in 2009-2020 with a company who used MicroFocus “AcuCOBOL” to modernize a green-screen automotive dealership management system into a Windows GUI.

I wouldn’t say I did it for fun, but I did do it for the learning experience. My university was very invested in COBOL, and I had classmates who got offers much larger than mine to work for various finance companies in Wisconsin, so I had already learned the basics of language.

It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.

Migrating data files to new descriptors was always a stressful time. The equivalent of a database schema change, but you had to load the old files and rewrite in the new format largely manually.

The tooling we used felt dated, but worked well enough. Better than the tools we used in school.

I always used “Murach’s Structured COBOL” [1] as my primary reference. Carried that book just about everywhere during that time.

[1]: Murach's Structured COBOL https://a.co/d/hONfFT7

I messed around with it, thinking it seemed interesting and could be useful to know Just-In-Case. One thing I didn't get, until I started messing with it, is that COBOL isn't a general purpose language. There's a whole category of things it just can't do, and if you ask about it you'll just be told "COBOL isn't C". There's another set of things it's really effective at, primarily transactions and large iterations.

Mess around with it if you want, sure. Just realize it's a limited language with specific use cases and you're unlikely to ever touch it outside of those, even as a hobby/"for fun".

Yes, somewhat for fun and somewhat for work. There are online cobol fiddle environments that can help you. Data is stored in something like a c Union on a buffer, and the programming style is pre-procedural, sort of like a very easy assembly language. The language is very wordy, and there aren't a lot of standard libraries.

It is ok for storing and updating records, but writing complex algorithms would be slow

I had to learn it as part of my undergrad. It was the most unfun course of my undergrad.

I had to deal with a bunch of mainframes in a previous job and tried to learn a bit of COBOL. One interesting thing I learned early on was that programs are almost never written exclusively in COBOL. The language isn't Turing complete (by design), so a significant portion of a program's logic will be captured in the JCL (Job Control Language) script that configures how the program will run and orchestrates multiple programs.

I read 'Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)' and the whole time I kept thinking that learning one of these old languages could be fun and would be a good side project. Would definitely be a lot of good projects to work on if you looked for them as paid gigs.

I wouldn’t say I learned it “for fun”, but when my sister was in college (25 years ago) as a business information systems major (or something like that), she had to take a Cobol course so I learned enough of it to help her get through the class. Next semester, she told me she had to take a second Cobol class. I told her I was done with Cobol and she switched majors.

reading frequently on HN how COBOL is still running critical tasks, I would rather say "for fun and profit"

I had a COBOL class for college and then had to relearn it for a job, but never actually got to use it.

I don't find it interesting in any way and would only use it for good money.

Assembler is more rewarding as an intellectual exercise. Unless you really want to do rote record processing, in which case knock yourself out.

I've actually seen some of the COBOL that underpins these financial entities. Typically the code base and writing style has morphed into a number of nearly incompatible dialects over the decades it has ran at these places. I've never really learned enough about it to understand copybooks and the other functions/file types it has.

I took a course in my undergrad for fun. It's an interesting design paradigm, all the code had a built in schema attached to it, if I recall correctly, which I've come to appreciate and find more interesting over time.

Using the AS400 was very interesting as well.

The problem about COBOL, for me, is it's so specifically designed to fill a niche of business record processing, that I'd never use it for a side project. It's too verbose, and too restricting.

Like with most languages, learning the language is easy. Learning all the libraries, especially the undocumented proprietary ones, is the hard part.

Some COBOL stories caught my eye recently around here:

Learn COBOL in a day

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37388560

COBOL gets new life in the cloud thanks to Watsonx and AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37277191

There are lots of things that I would rather do for fun than program in COBOL.

I have programmed in COBOL on ICL and IBM computers. You don't just program in COBOL, you need to learn SQL, JCL, TSO, CICS, etc. Maybe it is simpler with MicroFocus (or similar) COBOL on Linux, haven't ventured there.

Well, for web programming there is this:

http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM

Haven't used it in anger though.

I had a COBOL class in school and I enjoyed. At the time I didn't think about it, but today it feels more like a DSL than a general purpose programming language.

i wouldn't say fun, but it is easy. back in the 1980s i had to write a couple of cobol programs to unpack some dec10 isam files so that i could import them into our spiffing new ibm 4381 4gl (nomad/2 if anyone is interested). i read a cobol tutorial in the morning, and wrote the programs in the afternoon. only problem was my spelling - i couldn't spell "environment" as in cobol's ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

and as others have observed, it's the infrastructure (JCL, TP monitors, etc.) which is the real problem.

It's on my list of languages to learn, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

My first job was supporting a custom application running in UniVerse on Solaris. It originally ran on a Prime mainframe and UniVerse was one of the ways you could run this type of software on a modern system. I really enjoyed working in the Pick MultiValue environment. In many ways, this was a NoSQL database from before NoSQL was a big thing.

I don't work in this world anymore, but I've been playing with ScarletDME (a fork of OpenQM, another MultiValue database, from before they closed the source) and seriously enjoying it.

As a result of this first job I've got a special place for "old" programming languages/environments. My dream retirement job is to work for either the CRA or IRS supporting their old systems. Between the complexities of income tax and the old-school code that can never be retired I think I'd love it.

I was working with a bunch of COBOL programmers and learned the language as an act of solidarity. Wrote a basic API framework in it.

I really love it. I think there are a number of language features (like the memory handling) which have elements missing from a lot of modern languages.

"Has anyone here been stabbing themselves in the eye for fun? How did it go?"

I took a mainframe class in college (2016) after my mom encouraged me to (she just recently retired as a COBOL/JCL developer of 35+ years). We learned COBOL and JCL on zOS and completed IBM's Master the Mainframe challenge. It was a very interesting experience and a different paradigm than any other CS/information systems classes I took.

I could have gotten a job doing this work very easily. When I was applying and interviewing at my university career fair, I got a lot of interest and a couple job offers from having this class on my resume, but the pay wasn't good (small city it the south US that I wanted to leave), and I didn't want to lock myself into mainframes.

I can't say that I specifically learnt COBOL for fun because I did it in 1997 or so in India when the entire Indian IT industry was bidding on a host Y2K migration projects. I only graduated college in May 2000, so I never actually used COBOL to solve any Y2K problems, however, I did figure out that you could use a large number of paragraphs in the SCREEN SECTION to build animation frames and use that to build fun animations. It was tedious though, so I wrote a C++ program to generate the SCREENs for the COBOL program.

Yeah, I learned COBOL for sort-of-fun (in the sense that it wasn't strictly for a paid gig) a long time ago. It went pretty well, in that I learned that, while it isn't a fun language in any sense of the word, it Just Works and even adheres to the revered Unix principle "do one thing, and do it well" in most production situations.

Most COBOL programs have a very well-defined batch-oriented flow: take this file, process it, then output these file(s) within N hours. Reliability is paramount: batches often run overnight, and you don't want operators getting angry with you. And there is an entire ecosystem, all consisting of proprietary (and expensive) IBM solutions like CICS, that make CRUD apps (which, admit it, is like 80% of all software...) pretty much a piece of cake.

The downside of all this, is that you're very much limited to whatever your vendor allows, that progress is glacial, and that innovation is pretty much unheard of (since that might break the batch, which is... a mortal sin). And, like with the Unix philosophy, orchestration of all those single-minded processes becomes an issue after a (short) while.

If anyone were to ask me whether they should "learn the language", my answer would be an unqualified no, unless it's for a specific paid assignment. There are no unique ideas hiding anywhere in COBOL that are absent from more modern (and more 'fun') languages.

But does it matter to learn the language paradigms and orchestration requirements? Sure: you may land a good gig if you understand where AS400s/i-Systems/whatever fit in, and it may give some insight into where things like Docker and K8S are coming from.

It was fun. Not even that hard, to be honest.

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/perceptronCobol

My wife made a COBOL mortgage calculator back in college for her CS programming languages course. She said it was more verbose than she would have liked, but it worked nonetheless.

We keep joking maybe she should apply for one of those high paid legacy COBOL jobs that make their way into the news cycle now and then.

I learned COBOL in college circa 2001 for one of the CS courses and it was so much fun. The task was to do a project together with another person in our class and then present it to the rest of the class. I remember loving the simplicity and how much "Plain English" the language was. Good toy project.

A curiosity, nothing more. And those high paying COBOL jobs pay a lot because the applicants have 20+ years of COBOL experience, not just because they happen to know COBOL.

I've coded in a lot of different programming languages over the past forty years or so, some of them for fun, some of them as part of my job.

I've also coded COBOL at a few places, both on PC and on mainframes years back.

But I can honestly say that I have never done anything in COBOL for the fun of it.

However this is not to dissuade anybody from ever doing this. COBOL and a few other old languages are still used in areas like banking today. So you might cross it at some point in time, even at the most modern workplace.

But as others have written in the comments, there is more to it than the language itself. You should really have a mainframe emulator (like Hercules) and other parts of the environment like CICS, TSO, ISPF and JCL if you really want to know how it feels like to code in COBOL. I don't know if it's even possible to get all of this up and running for free, but that could be a challenge in itself.

I don't know about fun, but maybe you can cosplay a1970's/1980's developer. The press (and many managers, directors, and even developers) treat COBOL knowledge as something that was doled out between 1965 and 1985 and then the world just ran out of it. Policy and decisions are made around COBOL as if it's impossible to understand and all knowledge has been lost. That leads to some pretty crazy situations.

It's a language that's built for one purpose, business style applications like CRMs or accounting systems. It's not mystically bad or so undecipherable. It's actually a pretty simple language. If you're consulting/contracting developer, or an in-house developer at a bank, insurance company, etc., you should learn it. Even if you don't do anything with it, you can pick up a used book on COBOL and get most of the regular patterns and practices.

Learning the basics of the language itself, if you've already a competent programmer, won't take you long. Maybe a half dozen weekends. But COBOL exists in an environment (normally IBM mainframes) that does a lot of the other lifting. CICS is an application server for COBOL (essentially). JCL manages what job to run and when. VSAM for indexed files or DB2 are the most common databases. And WebSphere for messaging. Becoming a 'real' COBOL developer on a mainframe is maybe 33% COBOL and the rest a miasma of mainframe-isms. And unlike Linux, there's no 'free' equivalent to a mainframe. (Although you can spend about $40 a day accessing a mainframe on IBM's cloud).

A few weekends won't turn you into a COBOL migration expert, but you can at least join the rest of us, rolling our collective eyes, when the governor of New Jersey asks for volunteer cobalt [sic] programmers because some key system is breaking down.

Back in the 80's a friend and I took a COBOL course at a community college in the evening when we were in high school. Most students were much older than we were.

We wrote our programs on special pads of paper, transferred them to punch cards, gave our decks to operators who would run our programs on an IBM. Around a half hour later the operators gave us back printouts with the results of our runs. Most people didn't wait around but my friend and I would stay late so we could get more runs in. If we were nice to the operator they might bump our job up in the queue.

Most of the programs we wrote were very simple. Things you could easily do now with a few lines of a modern scripting language.

Our class's teacher was a professional COBOL programmer who had a day job working at a soda company. Some kind of emergency came up at his job half way through the course and he stopped showing up so we were left on our own for a few weeks.

Just before the end of the class the department head took over and told everyone they would need to implement a binary search on the final exam. This was way too hard for most of the other students but not a big deal for my friend and I. We were done in a few minutes.

I was also fortunate to meet another guy in the class who asked me to help him with some programs he had to write at his job. He was a soil engineer who wanted to move into a finance job but found the programming work difficult, so I spent a few hours a week tutoring him and writing programs with him.

Eventually I graduated and he ran out of work for me but by then we became good friends. While I can't say I got much out of of the COBOL class I'm glad I took it because if I hadn't I would not have met him.

We're doing Mainframe modernizations/integrations with the cloud @Mechanical Orchard. It's been really fun to see and learn the entomology of how computing got to where it is today.

As other folks have described programming on the mainframe is about learning COBOL + JCL. I would also add that you need to understand how to read/write binary files according to a defined schema (Copybook) and encoding (EBCDIC, COMP, COMP-3, COMP-5). It's also helpful to deeply understand the intricacies of Db2 and different methods of connection (ODBC, JDBC, Db2 CLI).

I've even gone so far as to write an ODBC extension for DuckDB so that we can scan and process queries faster and with less MIPS usage. https://github.com/rupurt/odbc-scanner-duckdb-extension

https://www.mechanical-orchard.com

As a teenager in 1975, I was interested in programming, and found that my county library branch had introductory books on a half-dozen languages, including COBOL. I checked out each book and implemented a small set of programs. I had no machine, I carefully desk-checked each program.

In the case of COBOL, calculations were tedious. I escaped into the loving arms of the COMPUTE statement. I later read that this was a cultural violation similar to using unPythonic code in Python. But I didn’t have a mentor, much less a reviewer.

I think this counts as “for fun”. I later earned minor ducats writing little RPG programs, and the rest of my career has been far, far away from such programs.

I was paid to throw COBOL in the late 1970's, and I would bag fries before I'd do it again.

RPG2 was fun, TUTLY was ... interesting. COBOL? Never again.