I won't argue the merits of COBOL. I stopped doing it for a living 35 years ago for a reason, but sort is not a good example. COBOL has generic SORT and MERGE facilities built in as verbs. In an IBM environment (i.e. writing real applications) you'd be hard pressed to build something that has better performance than what's provided out of the box.
Re:The Beauty of COBOL (2018)
by marktangotango on Friday October 18, 2019 @12:08PM
(#21292551)
Those were good for working with flat files and nothing else!
The author is falling into the trap of assuming that “easy to learn” = “optimal”. COBOL is extremely easy to learn; you can learn it in a few days. That simplicity comes at a price: you outgrow it _really fast_. You can’t even write a generic sort routine or a linked list data structure in COBOL; the language just doesn’t allow that sort of reuse. I thought it was almost comical that the author had so little experience with COBOL that he wrote that it allowed you to not repeat yourself: the painful experience of rewriting things like sort routines every time you had a different comparison condition or rewriting linked list traversal code when you had a structure with a different schema than the structure that you last wrote linked list traversal code for was the reason everybody started abandoning COBOL for more flexible languages like C (even Pascal was better).