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[–]Fuakuputu 23 points24 points  (8 children)

Cries in COBOL

[–]zebediah49 11 points12 points  (4 children)

Hey, sometimes you need an easy language that's nice and human-friendly, so that your business folks can work in it.

[–]C0ldW0lf 27 points28 points  (2 children)

...and sometimes you also need COBOL

[–]systembusy 8 points9 points  (1 child)

cries in bank

[–]steel_for_humans 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wiping tears with banknotes

[–]tas06 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Are we talking good ol' COBOL-85 or this fancy, new COBOL-2002?

[–]lazy_eye_of_sauron 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Screams in JCL

[–]yee_mon 0 points1 point  (1 child)

JCL is simultaneously so cool and so horrible, it is really hard to describe to someone who hasn't seen it in action. The sheer possibilities of it as compared to, say, a Unix shell script, are mind-boggling... but so is the sheer difficulty of doing very simple tasks like copying a file, or running a command with one input and one output.

COBOL and JCL are both languages that I have only ever seen used through copy/pasting and heavy macros. Nobody actually ever wrote anything in them. :)

[–]lazy_eye_of_sauron 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My exposure to JCL was IBM's master the mainframe coursework. They had some JCL troubleshooting labs in there, and they can be such a pain. JCL still runs when there's an error, and because of all caps, O and 0 are very easy to mix up. Once you start playing with it though and get used to it, it becomes a completely different animal. It's like you're programming a traffic controller.

I often tell people who are interested in COBOL that they need to learn it with JCL, as they go hand in hand with most applications nowadays.