The First COBOL Bootcamp | Hacker News Reader

The First COBOL Bootcamp

gracehopper.com

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"Hello COBOL Cutting Edge Computer-Age Classic"

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.

000300

000400 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

000500 CONFIGURATION SECTION.

000600 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.

000700 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.

000800

000900 DATA DIVISION.

001000 FILE SECTION.

001100

101200 PROCEDURE DIVISION.

101300

101400 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.

101500 DISPLAY "Hello world, I'm back!"

101600 STOP RUN.

If this ain't april fools joke lord have mercy on us.

I was able to easily read that English-like syntax.

Someday people will be posting similar Javascript jabs on April 1 and laughing about how people could ever have had serious jobs working with such a ridiculous language.

In case people are confused - the Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy is a real bootcamp. They do not teach COBOL - that's the April Fool's joke.

It's confusing to me, because all the April Fool's jokes appear on April the second. You American's are always behind the times.

This is interesting. I think 2020 is an achievable number.

I'm an accountant by profession, and since I program; I got thrown into a project at work where we had to reverse-engineer COBOL code to figure out what the banking system was doing. It was a painful exercise by today's standards as the code was badly written, but we pulled through.

There was a script of a few thousand lines, which calculated interest on most of the cheque and investment products. It had the "here be dragons" disclaimer. After defeating the dragons, I asked if I could add "dragon slayer was here", but that wasn't going to happen, so I made it my pinned tweet (@nevi_me).

I wonder if it would be worth my while to join the bootcamp and learn COBOL properly.

I thought this was going to be a historical article about some training camp Admiral Hopper arranged for swabbies who needed to learn COBOL.

Or at least for swabbies who needed to learn programming and were going learn COBOL because the way admiralty works.

Given that I've heard day rates as high as £2000 for a CIVIL engineer, this would be great if it is a real thing. Alas, the timing of the post suggests otherwise...

This is not satire right?

gotta be April fools

Funny thing is, this is the Grace Hopper Program, so it would be totally appropriate for them to teach COBOL. After all, they're named after its inventor. (Okay, technically, it was a committee, but still, you don't get nicknamed the (grand)mother of COBOL just by sitting on a committee.)

Nevertheless, I don't think they're serious. Which kinda makes me wonder: there are way too many lines of COBOL out there to rewrite them all before the current COBOL programmers retire. And yet no one (give or take rounding error) is learning or teaching it these days. So what happens by the time COBOL turns 100? It's not much farther away than the Y2038 bug.

Do we really need someone to teach it? Presumably old books on COBOL still exist, or at least some sort of documentation. If there is a need/demand then reasonably talent programmers could probably pick it up. I haven't learned most of my (minimal) programming from courses but from books.

Not everyone can learn via book. If they could there would be not need for a bootcamp in general

I am actually having enormous trouble telling. They seem to link to real articles about their academy at real publications (such as https://www.forbes.com/sites/leoking/2016/01/30/shanna-grego...), plus, there is a LOT of material here for a joke site. But it sure sounds to me like satire.

I hate April Fools so fucking much. Hate it.

Real academy, fake COBOL bootcamp. It's just that one page that's the joke - the rest of the site is about their real JavaScript bootcamp.

Thx.

What, no mention of moving the mainframe to web assembly?

Or just letting IBM Watson learn COBOL so we can continue figuring out how to prevent the Node event loop from drying up.

Or implementing Watson in JS with web workers to learn COBOL to prevent the event loop from drying up.

what is the significances of 2020 in COLBOL? Given the 2038 issue COLBOL may again become in high demand.

cobol would be much nicer if it accepted camelCase.

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