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'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.
Or at least for swabbies who needed to learn programming and were going learn COBOL because the way admiralty works.
I hate April Fools so fucking much. Hate it.
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.
