NJ Governor Requests Expertise of 6 People Who Still Know COBOL

[rcjordan]

What Is COBOL, What Does It Have To Do With The Coronavirus?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/what-is-cobol-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-the-coronavirus.html

[ergophobe]

Ah shoot. I'm not qualified.

When I was still a computer science major and doing my co-op semester, most companies were looking for either COBOL or FORTRAN. I ended up working for MITRE using FORTRAN.

Back then, we used ALL CAPS a lot even when we weren't yelling.

OT, but a bit amusing: MITRE originally stood for MIT Research Engineering. The company was fully private with few if any ties to MIT when I worked there. In corporate orientation materials, they kept stressing that MITRE, in all caps, absolutely, positively, certainly does not stand for anything. It rather signifies the joining of skills as in a mitred joint in woodworking.

Within the rank and file, it was asserted that in fact it was an acronym and stood for Many Idiots Trying to Ruin Everything.

[littleman]

My dad's wife is actually a very experienced COBOL programmer.  She use to do it for Ross Perot, then did it for 20 years at Wells Fargo.  She's soon to be 81.

[ergophobe]

She's soon to be 81.

That's probably the average age of the really good COBOL programmers :-)

[gm66]

Who'd have thought they'd be needing that again!

Programmed in COBOL as part of a course decades ago, forgotten every single thing i learned about it.

[rcjordan]

All my programming languages are dead languages now, hhh.  The one I did the most work in was an obscure, proprietary language named "Prime" by Mid-American Control.  A close second would be GP300 by Burroughs, but I hated compiling so I eventually started writing in machine language (All I remember is 0800 = null. I did a lot of nulls, hhh.)