Quote of the week [LWN.net]

I once scoffed at the idea that anyone would write in COBOL anymore, as if the average COBOL programmer was some sort of second-class technology citizen. COBOL programmers in 1991, and even today, are surely good programmers — doing useful things for their jobs. The same is true of Perl these days: maybe Perl is finally getting a bit old fashioned — but there are good developers, still doing useful things with Perl. Perl is becoming Free Software's COBOL: an aging language that still has value.

Perl turns 25 years old today. COBOL was 25 years old in 1984, right at the time when I first started programming. To those young people who start programming today: I hope you'll learn from my mistake. Don't scoff at the Perl programmers. 25 years from now, you may regret scoffing at them as much as I regret scoffing at the COBOL developers. Programmers are programmers; don't judge them because you don't like their favorite language.

— Bradley Kuhn

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Quote of the week

Posted Dec 20, 2012 16:50 UTC (Thu) by butcher (guest, #856) [Link] (2 responses)

I can't seem to keep up.

My bachelors degree in the '70s was CIS, or "Glorified CoBOL Programmer". We actually did a good bit of hard CS, including data structures (yes, you can make linked lists in CoBOL), but all that was just to have a technical degree to get into USAF pilot training. That didn't work out, but that's a story for another website...

So, back to computing in the '80s, S-100 bus computers looked to be the path to the future. Ha.

Discovered Linux and Slackware in the '90s, and Perl seemed to be the glue that made it easy to do grand things. Now, admitting I know this language gets me quizzical looks akin to those surrounding the cliche response, "Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?"

So, in the current century I've just decided to consciously go retro, with C++ (well, actually C encased in classes, too lazy to learn the new libraries). The rest of you can go Railroading with Ruby or noodling node.js, let me know how it turns out.

COBOL

Posted Dec 21, 2012 10:45 UTC (Fri) by cibyr (subscriber, #87609) [Link] (1 responses)

If I could make COBOL-contractor money writing Perl I'd quit my job in a heartbeat. I've worked on other people's Perl before and there's worse things in the world. Perl has been superseded by better (and far more comprehensible) languages, but it has no crippling limitations. When you need to Get Shit Done™, Perl is not going to stop you.

COBOL

Posted Dec 21, 2012 11:22 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

I second ALL of that. Actually, when it gets to Get Sh*t Done, Perl actually makes (for me) things easier than most of the alternatives.

Quote of the week

Posted Dec 22, 2012 11:26 UTC (Sat) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (1 responses)

It's an odd comment about a language which is still being actively enhanced. The last Perl release was only 6 weeks ago. The last COBOL standard was 10 years ago.

Quote of the week

Posted Dec 23, 2012 2:36 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

> It's an odd comment about a language which is still being actively enhanced. The last Perl release was only 6 weeks ago. The last COBOL standard was 10 years ago.

Ten years ago, COBOL was 40 years old, so we can only hope Perl gets there; as I said before, when I really have to Get Sh*t Done, Perl is still top of the line.