Just had a dinner with a collegemate (close friend too) who is expertise in COBOL programming. Of course if I ask where he considers himself an expert, he definitely will say he doesn't. But to me, after more than 5 years working on a particular programming language, one must be somewhat expert of it. We talked a lot, the topics cover from web hosting to hot sales girls at the roadshow. Don't get too excited, I'm not going to talk about the sales girls. Instead, I'd like to talk about the boring COBOL.
As a Java programmer, it's invetable that I'd find COBOL boring. I studied COBOL during college time, the reason I find it boring not because the syntax is boring or the editor is dumb. It's also not because it can't achieve the fancy output such as animation, cool graphics or even GUI. It's because I couldn't think of any useful software that I can build in COBOL. But it's entirely different case for my friend, he writes systems in COBOL for AS/400 platform at a big and well-known insurance company. Everyday hundreds of end users access the systems to perform numerous critical transactions which involve thousands of ringgit. By now, does it sound boring? Obviously not, furthermore there is COBOL .NET CLR available and I'm sure that my friend will have a very bright future in this area.
Sometimes ago I told my friend who is a long-time COBOL programmer that he would have a very bright future on what he's doing now. But he didn't seem to agree much as he said low level programming isn't as exciting as I elaborated, luckily I just found a
Tracked: May 09, 09:47