Hacker News Reader

Comment by codenesium | Hacker News Reader

I worked in COBOL at an internship and this was around 2012. This system runs over 1000 court systems in the U.S. It's graphical too and sort of looks like vb6 on the frontend. It was a nightmare to work in even though the team was disciplined and took care of the codebase. You can't write 10k line programs with all global variables and have something that's nice to work on.

View on HN

My first gig was a HLASM/COBOL internship at an insurance company.. so true, 10k line programs with all globals was the entire codebase. Navigating it with only a 3270 emulator gave me headaches but in a way it was fun. Coding it felt like doing a sudoku.

Did the software happen to be used by courts in NY? On a job, I worked with fixed width ASCII NY court data that was processed on some sort of mainframe that was setup in the late 70s maybe early 80s. Still gets updated many times a day with every single civil case in NY state, always wondered if it was COBOL based.

I remember working on a super-old-legacy Fortran program that had 6-character significance for the variable names.

I vaguely remember they had different namespaces using common blocks.

This might not be all that old! Early ISO C standard (1990) had the same 6-significant-character limitation for identifiers exported across translation units. So far as I know, this quirk is there because early C implementations reused pre-existing Fortran 77 linkers, many of which still had that limit at the time.

AcuCOBOL? I used AcuCOBOL at my internship back in 2009-2010 to build VB6-style forms with COBOL.

For me it was micro focus Cobol.

MicroFocus bought AcuCorp, so that might have been the same product.

Ah MicroFocus where enterprise products go to die a very slow drawn out death

Ah, so that's why MicroFocus stock suddenly started surging a few days ago. I got stuck with some shares when they spun off from HP. It's my worst performing stock and I couldn't figure out what the heck they did. But now COBOL oriented companies are booming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com