Infinite Wishes: ♾️🧞‍♀️✨

Is a weblog by Emma Humphries

COBOL

03 May 2020

A detail of the cover of "COBOL With Style: Programming Proverbs" by Chmura and Ledgard for which I paid no small sum for at a fundraising auction for the Otherwise Award

Folks are talking about COBOL again, now that people remember that much of what we take for granted runs on it.

  1. My upstairs neighbor maintains a COBOL codebase
  2. Admiral Hopper helped develop COBOL
  3. Edsger Dijkstra dissed COBOL; Edsger Dijkstra is dead; COBOL is still in use
  4. ESR dissed COBOL in The Jargon File; ESR was cancelled; COBOL is still in use

Too ‘nuff said.

This video is a hoot, if only for the joke about punch cards and responsive design.