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

[Pat McEvoy]

Peertube video should be available shortly:
https://toobnix.org/w/4KZXQBU8iDCprQRH1b1zvF

On Wed, Nov 5, 2025 at 4:21 PM Pat McEvoy <mcevoy.pat at gmail.com> wrote:

> In fact we plan to stream to both our website, Peertube via Toobnix.org,
> and YouTube. (BSDTV)
>
> NYC*BUG <https://www.nycbug.org/cgi?action=streaming>
> nycbug.org <https://www.nycbug.org/cgi?action=streaming>
> <https://www.nycbug.org/cgi?action=streaming>
> <https://www.nycbug.org/cgi?action=streaming>
>
> Patrick McEvoy
>
>
> On Nov 5, 2025, at 12:40, Tara Stella <tara at tara.sh> wrote:
>
> 
> 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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