Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
> >> regarded as a criminal offense." (Dijkstra)
> >>
> >> Seeing the 8-line Hello World implementation, I'm tending to agree...
> >
> > There are days that I tend to agree with that too.  Though I am not a COBOL
> > programmer, I am tech support for a medium size mainframe operating system, and
> > have to deal with a programming staff of COBOL programmers.  When a select few
> > of them have problems, and its always the same select few, I have to help them
> > debug their programs.  Though we have some very sharp people working here, there
> > are some I don't know how they find their way to work every morning.
>
> I went to uni with a bunch of people who were taught COBOL rather than
> Pascal at college. (Apparently due to the Y2K marketin- uh, concerns.) I
> don't know much about COBOL myself. All I heard is "if you miss out one
> dot, the compiler will report an error message 800 lines later".
>
> (I don't know whether that's true or not, but any programming language
> where beginners might realistically write an 800 line program worries me!)
>
> > So the following statement is perfectly valid:
> >
> > IF IF = THEN THEN THEN = ELSE; ELSE ELSE = IF;
> >
> > This can lead to some very difficult debugging.
>
> That's fairly tame compered to the lambda calculus. (Then again... no
> sane human being writes programs using the lambda calculus!)
>
> --
> http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
> http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Since I am unfamiliar with lambda calculus, not being taught in the FORTRAN
class I took at college, I looked it up on wikipedia.  After a few paragraphs,
my eyes glazed over and could no longer focus.  At least I now understand where
the lambda function in Python came from.   As far as COBOL is concerned, we
typically assign new programmers to maintaining existing programs, some of
which are over 15000 lines long.  I have heard that programs that size are not
that unusual in the COBOL world.

Isaac

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