100th Anniversary of the birth of COBOL's creator
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
A look below the surface of the computer world uncovers some very old technology - such as the Cobol programming language. The COmmon Business Oriented Language was created in 1959 and, though it is no longer taught in schools and universities, Wow, I was born in 1959. My company still uses cobol for a lot of things, despite it has been declared dead many times.
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A look below the surface of the computer world uncovers some very old technology - such as the Cobol programming language. The COmmon Business Oriented Language was created in 1959 and, though it is no longer taught in schools and universities, Wow, I was born in 1959. My company still uses cobol for a lot of things, despite it has been declared dead many times.
Used it once at college, we had to write a simple inventory program and report, wow I remember it being so verbose. Oh well in the real world when I left college I had start with MSDIL Pick O/S a refreshing change from Cobol I must say.
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them. Steve Jobs
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
great woman ,wonderful ;)work
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it was invented by a woman ? that must be why it's so verbose, it never want to end talking and writing and talking writing, just annoying as hell.
Maximilien Lincourt Your Head A Splode - Strong Bad
Didn't think it would take long for a comment such as that!
Kevin
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it was invented by a woman ? that must be why it's so verbose, it never want to end talking and writing and talking writing, just annoying as hell.
Maximilien Lincourt Your Head A Splode - Strong Bad
Look in the mirror ;P
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it was invented by a woman ? that must be why it's so verbose, it never want to end talking and writing and talking writing, just annoying as hell.
Maximilien Lincourt Your Head A Splode - Strong Bad
Maximilien wrote:
it was invented by a woman ? that must be why it's so verbose
It was invented to be English like, she assumed men were incapable of learning something new. ;P just ask the grand nag us. since your comment (and similar) have been around since the dawn of time, I gather she was correct. :rolleyes:
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
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I was lucky enough to see her talk, twice.
Tim Smith I'm going to patent thought. I have yet to see any prior art.
I was fortunate to have been able to attend one of her talks where she always handed out nanoseconds, a piece of wire that was the length that light would travel in on microsecond. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a leader in the development of the early compilers that were the forerunners of today's sophisticated languages By modern standards COBOL is horrible but when it was developed you had a choice of COBOL, some sort of assembler or machine language. We have a lot to thank her for. An ex-mainframer. -- modified at 15:37 Monday 11th December, 2006
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
Most of you seem to have no idea. COBOL was one of the first structured languages. It's "verbose" code was meant to be self-documenting. Back in the day when Fortran variable names maxed out at 6 chars, it was a relief to have real names for variables. Also, I'll have to say, I'm a bit shocked at some of the misogynist comments here. Steve
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Maximilien wrote:
it was invented by a woman ? that must be why it's so verbose
It was invented to be English like, she assumed men were incapable of learning something new. ;P just ask the grand nag us. since your comment (and similar) have been around since the dawn of time, I gather she was correct. :rolleyes:
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:
just ask the grand nag us.
:laugh::laugh::laugh:
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes
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I was lucky enough to see her talk, twice.
Tim Smith I'm going to patent thought. I have yet to see any prior art.
Tim Smith wrote:
I was lucky enough to see her talk, twice.
I saw her speak once and also feel fortunate for having the opportunity. She was a visionary. :cool:
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes
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Most of you seem to have no idea. COBOL was one of the first structured languages. It's "verbose" code was meant to be self-documenting. Back in the day when Fortran variable names maxed out at 6 chars, it was a relief to have real names for variables. Also, I'll have to say, I'm a bit shocked at some of the misogynist comments here. Steve
For those of you making the jokes about her being a woman, imagine the difficulty she faced as a project manager and Captain in the Navy in a time when women were treated like that to their faces in all seriousness. And yet, despite all that, she invented a language that was structured, trainable, and used happily by programmers such as myself for decades to follow. My hat's off to her, may she rest in peace. Jim
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Most of you seem to have no idea. COBOL was one of the first structured languages. It's "verbose" code was meant to be self-documenting. Back in the day when Fortran variable names maxed out at 6 chars, it was a relief to have real names for variables. Also, I'll have to say, I'm a bit shocked at some of the misogynist comments here. Steve
mobilemobile wrote:
Back in the day when Fortran variable names maxed out at 6 chars, it was a relief to have real names for variables
I agree. There is no rule that you had to over do it. Although I never programmed in COBOL professionally (only once in university) I have been involved in technical support for a number of "COBOL Shops" over the years. The code ran the spectrum from spaghetti to highly structured. I have even seen bit manipulation implemented in COBOL, albeit with much difficulty. It all depended on the developer. Some were professional and some wanted to write a paperback novel.
I'm on-line therefore I am. JimmyRopes
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
Programmers have got to be one of the few professions in the world that for the most part don't feel any need to honour those that broke ground and innovated in their day but instead mock their work as being antiquated or somehow silly. The tools we have now didn't just fall out of a tree.
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Programmers have got to be one of the few professions in the world that for the most part don't feel any need to honour those that broke ground and innovated in their day but instead mock their work as being antiquated or somehow silly. The tools we have now didn't just fall out of a tree.
John Cardinal wrote:
The tools we have now didn't just fall out of a tree
Absolutely!
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
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Programmers have got to be one of the few professions in the world that for the most part don't feel any need to honour those that broke ground and innovated in their day but instead mock their work as being antiquated or somehow silly. The tools we have now didn't just fall out of a tree.
John Cardinal wrote:
Programmers have got to be one of the few professions in the world that for the most part don't feel any need to honour those that broke ground and innovated in their day but instead mock their work as being antiquated or somehow silly. The tools we have now didn't just fall out of a tree.
Agreed. I've never done anything with cobol, but have done an asm class in college, and ran into fortan twice in an astronomy class. Neither are anything I'd voluntarily work in today, but unpleasant as Fortran is compared to modern languages it's still massive step forward from raw assembler. If I needed to, I could probably pick it up basic proficiency in it as quickly as something like Ruby, Python, or Lisp. RandomProccessorAssembly would take far longer to learn well enough to do anything useful in, and still take far longer to do any useful task than a normal compiled language.
-- Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.
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I was fortunate to have been able to attend one of her talks where she always handed out nanoseconds, a piece of wire that was the length that light would travel in on microsecond. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a leader in the development of the early compilers that were the forerunners of today's sophisticated languages By modern standards COBOL is horrible but when it was developed you had a choice of COBOL, some sort of assembler or machine language. We have a lot to thank her for. An ex-mainframer. -- modified at 15:37 Monday 11th December, 2006
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Most of you seem to have no idea. COBOL was one of the first structured languages. It's "verbose" code was meant to be self-documenting. Back in the day when Fortran variable names maxed out at 6 chars, it was a relief to have real names for variables. Also, I'll have to say, I'm a bit shocked at some of the misogynist comments here. Steve
Amen, it's a relief to work in COBOL after seeing some other languages. Languages fall along a spectrum: Pascal tries to enforce structured programming, COBOL permits fully structure programming, FORTRAN forces unstructured programming. So the quality of COBOL code depends on the programmer and the organization's development standards. The textbooks and manuals never captured the reality of how COBOL was used, and there were some elegant systems developed with it. I think the beauty of COBOL is it allows the programmer to focus on business rules and express logic very similar to pseudocode. Its datatypes are currency-friendly and it handles rounding and value comparisons with more economical code than FORTRAN. One place where COBOL falls short is its inability to handle variable length strings; parsing files with foreign formats such as XML is a nightmare. One of the reasons it endures in Fortune 500 companies is it handles complex and high-volume batch processing very effectively. It's hard to beat for an application such as cranking out a million invoices for a utility company. Grace Hopper has always had her detractors, some with credible reasons. Nevertheless, she was an influential leader for data processing, a pioneer for progressive development tools, and her efforts helped build respect for software development as a profession.
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edeloye wrote:
a piece of wire that was the length that light would travel in on microsecond
Hmm, the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters/second. That would make the piece of wire around 300 meters long? :confused:
QRZ? de WAØTTN
I thought she handed out nanoseconds, just shy of 30 cm.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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The 100th anniversary of the birth of programming language pioneer Grace Hopper was celebrated on 9 December. Widely credited as being the "mother" of the Cobol computer language her work was hugely influential.[^]
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
For those who may be interested, here's the site for her namesake the Navy chose to honor her with. http://www.hopper.navy.mil/[^] Once upon a time I did some of the analysis for his class of ships.
The evolution of the human genome is too important to be left to chance.