Bah!
Nothing like hearing a tried and tested technology with deep market penetration and five decades of maturity in real world applications as diverse as banking and shop floor manufacturing systems being rubbished by a bunch of people who last used it to write a piece of course work in some bumf*ck university course.
Almost every criticism I hear of the language is either false (usually born of the complainer's own ignorance) or subjective - I'm particularly impressed by those who complain it is too "wordy", like anyone actually types in this cut'n'paste world. The most damning argument against the language in its own Wikipedia entry was for years a howling joke on the idiot wot rote it, showing he a) didn't know what he was talking about and 2) hadn't read the fine manual to find out.
The last time I looked a Cobol program could be written monolithically, modularly, dynamically linked (we usually didn't bother because static linking makes for faster programs and a compile took only a few seconds on a real computer) or statically linked. It could be written procedurally, which was the usual way people went about it, but: it could also be written in an entirely declarative way. It could be written as a decision/action matrix. It couldn't be written using OO techniques entirely, since that feature was still coming (it had been delayed by a blind alley involving people who thought "C" would make a better Data Processing language and that we wouldn't have any Cobol by 1995 doncha know). That is no longer true.
The compiler I used then (and it has long been superceded by a more modern one) was extremely good at figuring out what problems really were and reporting them accurately, in-line.
Of course, that was on a Unisys Clearpath mainframe running OS2200. If you're going to run a reliable language with mature features well-understood in the business DP world (none of that silly doing currency calculations in floating point variables that the bright young things thought was such a good idea during the "Cobol Out, C In, Baby Out With The Bathwater" heydays of the early 90s), you really should be running it on the Rolls Royce of Operating Systems in a reliable recoverable environment.
:o)
It is worth saying that someone once opined at me that perhaps people insisted on viewing Cobol as an IT language during debates on it, when in fact it is a DP language. The reverse could be said for "C" and its bretheren. Thank you Dan for that insight.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
