COBOL in 100 seconds

common business oriented language or COBOL is a weak verbose and flabby language used by coat grinders to do boring things on dinosaur mainframes it was developed over 100 years ago in 1959 but is still in demand today in 2020 because it's the language used on many mainframe computer systems you know those things we call big iron usually built by IBM to handle massive amounts of throughput to handle things like credit card transactions airline ticketing and most recently the massive spike in unemployment claims so if you want to be a programmer in 2020 COBOL might be your best bet it's a high-level imperative language which means it's very easy to learn the syntax is extremely verbose by design because it's self documenting and it contains over 600 reserved words for you to memorize to take advantage of and every COBOL program is structured with an easy-to-follow hierarchy your program contains many divisions which contain many sections which contain many paragraphs which contain many sentences that contain your statements which of course contain many characters when you start writing some COBOL code you'll notice these vertical lines in your IDE the first six characters are your line numbers start at zero zero zero one hundred and increment by 100 for each line column seven is where you identify comments or the continuation of a previous line if we're identifying a new division section or paragraph we can use columns 8 through 11 and notice how every line ends with a period that's what's known as readable code now columns 12 through 72 are where you write your actual statements the reason you don't go beyond 72 columns is because your code needs to fit onto a physical punch card and it ensures your program is responsive on mobile devices we can define our variables in the data division first we name the variable then we define its data type with the picture keyword then assign a value to it we can then work with this data in the procedure division we display the variable then tell our program to stop from there we can pile our program to a binary run it and everything should work perfectly and now you're qualified for a six-figure salary maintaining the world's most critical legacy systems this has been COBOL in 100 seconds hit the like button if you want to see more short videos like this thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one oh hey there thanks for sticking around this is the part of the video where we go beyond 100 seconds to learned some more advanced features of COBOL

Channel: Fireship

Views: 774,468

Keywords: cobol, cobol language, programming, cobol basics, parody, compsci, computer science, mainframe, ibm, mainframe computer, 100secondsofcode

Id: 7d7-etf-wNI

Length: 2min 3sec (123 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Goingone]

“So it’s responsive on mobile devices” haha. That or the syntax error is my favorite part.

[u/u_tamtam]

from there we compile our program to a binary, run it, and everything should run perfectly

/Console spitting errors/

[u/[deleted]]

"600 Reserved words for you to memorize..."

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That's a hell of an entry barrier. When you look at more common languages like Java or python, they expand into their own form of monstrosity with libraries and objects. But an explosion of libraries seems easier to digest than having a huge dictionary to deal with because it's built on a simple foundation. I.e. a few keywords built around "everything is an object."

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This kinda seems like a parallel of 26 english characters vs hundreds/thousands of glyphs in some asian languages.

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For those with experience, can you guys chime in. Are these keywords substantial or is a lot of it something you would not use the majority of the time?

[u/ComplexColor]

I was disappointed to find other videos in this series are somewhat serious. This is a great format to roast any aspect of engineering.

[u/__konrad]

That Dilbert episode sort of predicted the current COBOL drama: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2fhokx (at 16:10)

[u/appmanga]

The only thing funny in there was a six-figure salary for COBOL programmers. Where? I'm available.

[u/georgeo]

Program not compiling because you didn't align the columns correctly was fun. Also English words for everything but if you want to declare a structure, well that keyword is 888 of course.

[u/subsisn]

“It was developed over 100 hundred years ago in 1959”

What year are we in?

[u/Fizzelen]

Flashbacks

COBOL is easy to write, difficult to make right

The "data structures" are hierarchical, just like management

Just don't mix up, grandparent, parent & child when processing files

And whatever you do, don't paste a program into the middle of itself (using VIM this is easy to do by being in the wrong mode) the compiler gets Trump level confused