COBOL vs Teh Governator

This just slays me. Do read the comments.

I must confess, I did 12 years of Mainframe COBOL - last logged on 99273. Yes I converted LOTS of dates from Julian prior to Y2K.

*sings*

"Every Byte is Precious"*

I still get to annually touch a few stray batch modules (ported to AS400 COBOL (tho CL is an fugly step-child to JCL, the COBOL works pretty much as-was with a few obvious changes to the Data Definition section)).

*to tune of "Every Sperm is Sacred"

Curious!!!

As a Contractor, I am most proficient at COBOL. There are other languages I ~prefer~ to code in, but I've been coding in COBOL , on and off, since 1980 (started with the '67 standards). My last contract ended almost 11 months ago. I've been on the short-list for 3 different Contracts since February, all for a significant drop in fees. Nobody seems to want to commit.

I haven't programmed in COBOL since '83. Has it changed at all?

I shudder whenever I look at COBOL, but have earned my living off of FORTRAN since 1978, although recently I do more work in POWERHOUSE. On an HP3000 no less.

I find it très amusant that California's payroll system is that antiquated.

Has it changed? Yes. I've worked on the Tandem platforms almost exclusively. After the '85 standards were rolled out, they changed their chips over to RISC, and a common runtime environment - all languages executed the from the same RTLib. So, the I/O functions are parametrized called procedures with requirements for length-of-whatever throughout and arrays of parameter values. I don't consider it 'progress'.