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

[Tara Stella]

Hi!
Can you share the slides or the recording when you can?
It's a bit too late for an old lady like me to watch it online at midnight ��‍♀️
I really really want to know about this.
Cheers,
Tara


On 5 November 2025 16:29:10 UTC, George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> 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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