100th Anniversary of the birth of COBOL's creator
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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.
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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
Grace Hopper did very important work. Her FLOW-MATIC language was the first english-like programming language. Most languages are english-like today, but in 1957 it was all machine-code and assembly. So, we can thank her for being able to name variables and use while-loops and such. However, she was *NOT* the creator of Cobol. Cobol was created by the CODASYL committee, of which she was *NOT* a member. She was credited as the "mother of Cobol" by the inventors of Cobol to honor her work. With all the available information online, I find it strange that people don't actually check the facts... M.
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Grace Hopper did very important work. Her FLOW-MATIC language was the first english-like programming language. Most languages are english-like today, but in 1957 it was all machine-code and assembly. So, we can thank her for being able to name variables and use while-loops and such. However, she was *NOT* the creator of Cobol. Cobol was created by the CODASYL committee, of which she was *NOT* a member. She was credited as the "mother of Cobol" by the inventors of Cobol to honor her work. With all the available information online, I find it strange that people don't actually check the facts... M.
blirp wrote:
With all the available information online, I find it strange that people don't actually check the facts...
So, why don't you complain to the BBC for not being an accurate news organisation then?
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
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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
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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 think he meant to write the distance travelled in 1 nanosecond which is about 300mm.
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blirp wrote:
With all the available information online, I find it strange that people don't actually check the facts...
So, why don't you complain to the BBC for not being an accurate news organisation then?
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
So, why don't you complain to the BBC for not being an accurate news organisation then?
I did. As well as to the webmaster of http://www.hopper.navy.mil/ Do you question my geekness? :-D M.
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Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
So, why don't you complain to the BBC for not being an accurate news organisation then?
I did. As well as to the webmaster of http://www.hopper.navy.mil/ Do you question my geekness? :-D M.
blirp wrote:
Do you question my geekness?
Not now I don't! :-D
Upcoming Scottish Developers events: * Glasgow: Tell us what you want to see in 2007 My: Website | Blog | Photos
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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
Admiral Hopper was a great person and contributed a great deal in the early years to the field of computer science, we all should be so lucky. Reportedly she was reponsible for the term "bug" when she found a dead moth in the relay contacts of a computer. I took COBOL as required in college but never did any programming in the language. As a mainframe programmer FORTRAN was the preferred language on the Control Data and Cray machines I worked with.