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

[Pat McEvoy]

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 9:23 AM Pat McEvoy <mcevoy.pat at gmail.com> wrote:

> Seems I spoke too soon. Toobnix is having trouble this morning. Will take
> a look and have finished videos posted to NYC*BUG website Meeting page.
> Patrick McEvoy
>
>
> On Nov 6, 2025, at 00:14, Pat McEvoy <mcevoy.pat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
> 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.
>>> ------------------------------
>>> talk mailing list
>>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>>> https://lists.nycbug.org:8443/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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