A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020)

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by zozbot234 on Friday May 07, 2021 @07:17AM (#27074639)

The article broadly claims that COBOL is viewed dismissively compared to other languages of similar vintage like C or FORTRAN, because unlike those latter it did not come out of a "research-oriented context". However, as a matter of fact, neither C nor FORTRAN came out of academia; much like COBOL, they were developed for practical use as opposed to "research". ISTM that the perceived issues with COBOL must be explained in some other way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by js8 on Friday May 07, 2021 @08:05AM (#27074977)

C has roots of its usage in academia, the same way Unix does.

I suspect, compared to other OSes of the era (Multics, MVS..), Unix doesn't require too much centralized control of (timeshared) operating system resources; for example the security model is extremely simple. So it was readily adopted in academia, because of this perceived user freedom (you just need a shell and you're good to go), and from there it spread to the industry.

So C and FORTRAN didn't came out of the academia, but were more widely adopted by it, which influenced later generations of students.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by pjmlp on Friday May 07, 2021 @08:14AM (#27075050)

Academia was crucial in the adoption of UNIX and C, because in the early days UNIX was free beer (AT&T tried to fix that afterwards), so a juicy alternative to paying for Multics, MVS...

That also made UNIX an ideal teaching device for OS programming classes versus the toy OSes developed by students.

Well, until AT&T forbade the circulation of UNIX V6 commented book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6t...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by anthk on Friday May 07, 2021 @12:04PM (#27077314)

What's your opinion on ITS?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by pjmlp on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:42AM (#27087033)

Not much, I have read a few articles about it, but never cared much to dive into it.

Other than it was probably great having an OS where LISP had the spotlight alongside Assembly.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Historical Perspective on COBOL (2020) by vincent-manis on Friday May 07, 2021 @10:53PM (#27083325)

The Bell Labs of the 1960s/70s was not a research institution???

[ Parent | on HN ]