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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Cobol's legacy lives as PL/SQL, ABAP, and other enterprise data handling languages. While everybody is quick to point that this is not "real programming", they required astonishing amounts of engineering efforts to make things work.

I would love to see a decent, modernized COBOL -- the same way they have modernized Fortran, so it is now a pretty decent numerical computing language. It would be a great hit.

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COBOL has been "modernized" quite a few times, but the syntax still looks pretty archaic, most likely to avoid breaking too much existing code. I'm sure backward compatibility is of paramount importance for it.

I saw that there's a version that compiles to .NET bytecode, so you could conceivably write an XBox game in COBOL.

Visual COBOL:

https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/

Compiles to native code, JVM bytecode, or MSIL (.NET).

PL/SQL is a descendant of Ada rather than COBOL, and it's at least as much real programming as making web stuff.

And Ada syntax is in turn derived from Pascal.

"real" programming like all the "C"-type languages e.g. JavaScript etc., are just filled with gobbly-gook special characters that lead to mistakes. However, it wraps spooky robes around those eho choose or have to master this junk. COBOL was/is bulky, but at least it attempted to be somewhat understandable unlike the "real" programming.

I disagree. "Real" programming languages attempt to be understandable by choosing and building around an appropriate set of abstractions for their purpose.; it's true that some were designed around various types of resource constraints based on the environments for which they were designed that involve terse expression of the abstractions, bit that's done to make them usable in that environment, not to “wrap spooky robes” around the programmers.

And excessive verbosity can be as much of an impediment to clarity as excessive terseness.

COBOL 2002 is object oriented. Not sure if that is what you mean by modernized and I'm also not sure how many people actually use it. I have the specification for COBOL 2002 and have been meaning to write a compiler for it but just haven't taken the time to sit down and actually do it (especially because there is no simple BNF grammar in the spec and I'd have to piece it all together).

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