COBOL
According to The Registry, COBOL is now slightly over 50 years old.
I wish I could say I never wrote a single line of COBOL, but I can't. In college, I was taught COBOL for three long years. Even though I've managed to purge most of that knowledge from my brain (good riddance), I still have nightmares about the horrible way in which one writes COBOL.
I wish I could say COBOL is dying, but it isn't. People still write new COBOL today. I mean, seriously, there's a standard called 'COBOL 2002. 'Nuff said.
I wish I could say COBOL isn't a problem, but it's the sole source of most of the Y2K issues way back when. Its features invite many of the kind of horribly wrong coding styles which cause bugs; Y2K is just one.
I wish I could say COBOL code is pretty, but it isn't. Just to give one example: the first 7 characters of every line of code in each and every COBOL program are 0x20. That is, space. Nothing. Utterly useless. There is no reason for this in modern environments, yet it's still there. Note why I dislike significant whitespace. Another example is the fact that you can't just say 'foo = 1 + 1'. Instead, you have to say 'MOVE 1 TO FOO', and then add a second statement that says 'ADD 1 TO FOO'. I'll just use english if I want to write a novel, thank you.
I wish I could say I didn't care about COBOL anymore, but for some weird reason, I do.
And just in case you were confused: no, I do not have warm, fuzzy feelings for COBOL.
If there was a button that would nuke all the COBOL code on the planet, would I push it? Probably not immediately. I'm sure it would take time for me to recover from the sheer joy of knowing that this button actually exists, before I'll be physically capable of keeping my hands steady for the amount of time required for me to actually be able to push it.
COBOL is proof of either the absense of any deity, or the existence of the devil. Given the chance, no sane person, let alone a sane deity, would allow the creation of such an abomination.
At least I don't have to deal with it anymore. That part is not going to change. Ever.
Hi Wouter,
I agree with you in that there's no reason why people should write new systems in COBOL. That said, in the old compilers used in old environments (where COBOL is meant to be) the 7 first columns of a COBOL code are suposed to have line numbers. In the company where I work some people like to use an editor, CANDE (it is actually more than an editor), that substitutes lines based on its line number.
You can also say 'foo = 1 + 1' like this: 'COMPUTE FOO = 1 + 1'. ADD is used mostly for += stuff.
Last of all, there is an on going project to convert COBOL code in java code where I work. It's really an automatic translation, so all flaws will be reproduced. I'll tell you later how it ends, so you can have hope (or not) that COBOL will eventually vanish.