K3RNEL

COBOL, not Kobol.

UPDATE: This post was meant to be a hilarious rebuttal to “Why develop in C#“, not to hurt the original author’s feelings.
Tom, if you shut down your blog because of this, I’m very sorry. I was just trying to prove anyone can make any language sound awesome.

I’m surprised absolutely no one has asked me the following question in these past few years:
“Why develop in COBOL”

A year ago I would have said, “COBOL? ROFLMAO!” but now I’d answer differently….

Background
Before this year I was Java’s husband, convinced nothing was better than some cross-platform Swiss-army-knife

Then Oracle bought Sun. Hudson got uncomfortable. Apache ragequits. And as I stared into the eyes of my Linux Penguin Plush, I decided to try it out.

CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL

It stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language. It’s capitalized. Drunk Hulk would be proud.

It was created in 1959. It’s probably older than Father Time and Fedora has no fancy COBOL IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio. It’s a vi vs emacs war, and I decided to side with gEdit.

Just like cockroaches, it’s lasted over 50 years, and there’s a lot of 80′s era software built on it that the companies would rather fix than rewrite. That means it’s here to stay.

Written in Ye Olde English

I always thought Visual Basic was hilariously self explanatory with their syntax. And then I met COBOL.
Instead of a more cryptic x+=y; it uses things like ADD VAR1 TO VAR2. It uses “OR” instead of ||. And it supports GOTO. That’s cute.

C# is for Hipsters

Kids nowadays and their fancy IDEs, always thinking Windows is where its at. Their cross-platform effort is called Mono, need I say more?

Every dolt in high school is learning the language, which will result in a saturated market. On the other side, every day, the price of COBOL Programmers goes up as we become rarer and rarer. At this rate, we’ll be worth more than Unobtanium by 2154.

I can copypaste code from Wikipedia

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world'.
          STOP RUN.

Conclusion

New isn’t necessarily better. Retro is where it’s at. It’s the reason why series like old Beverly Hills are getting remade while brilliant masterpieces like Firefly get shelved.

Old and proven is a safer bet. According to Wikipedia, there’s over 200 billion lines of code already written on it. What could go wrong?