[announce] Tonight NYC*BUG: The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

 The video for  NYC*BUG Nov 2025: The Once and Future COBOL, by James
Lowden  have been posted:
Peertube: https://toobnix.org/w/gHacaw1TMx7HqrUiZbHYjQ
Youtube: https://youtube.com/live/ldLIyticlNU


On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 12:56 AM NYC*BUG Announcements <
announce at lists.nycbug.org> wrote:

> RSVP ASAP to rsvp AT lists.nycbug.org to gain access to the meeting
> location.
>
> ****
>
> The Once and Future COBOL, James Lowden
> 2025-11-05 @ 18:45 local (23:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building
> (new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn
>
> GCC 15, released in April 2025, for the first time includes COBOL among
> the languages it compiles. Alongside the venerable gcc and g++, there is
> now gcobol.
>
> The reader may well wonder why a small company would devote years of
> development to produce a product they don't own and can't sell. Why did
> GCC decide to include COBOL? In short, what use is COBOL?
>
> To those questions and more, we have answers.
>
> As Mark Twain said of himself, news of COBOL's demise is much
> exaggerated. Industry studies show billions of lines of COBOL still in
> production. With a probability of 95%, your last ATM transaction went
> through a COBOL application. Not for nothing did nearly every large firm
> pull out the stops 25 years ago for Y2K to adapt their critical software
> to the 21st century. They didn't do that to throw it all away.
>
> COBOL was and remains useful because it was specifically designed for
> its problem domain. No language is better suited for nuts-and-bolts
> unglamorous data processing. For example, COBOL defines an I/O model,
> numerical precision, 8 forms of rounding, and over 100 runtime exceptions.
>
> Programming languages often have shallow, undeserved reputations. Lisp
> has too many parentheses, COBOL too many words, Perl is write-only.
> Let's talk about why COBOL remains viable and vital, and why it's now
> part of GCC.
>
> James lives in Maine, where he tries to work 11 months a year, reserving
> August for sailing with his wife and their dog. He worked for many years
> on Wall Street on quantitative research systems. For a decade he was the
> maintainer for FreeTDS (www.freetds.org), a client library for SQL
> Server. Due in part to his efforts, this year GCC 15 added COBOL to the
> suite of languages it compiles.
>
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