COBOL Archives - EXECPGM

Chris Verhoef debunking myths about legacy and COBOL

Post published:June 28, 2024
Post category:COBOL
Reading time:1 mins read

Last week, the De Technoloog, a BNR program, had a very nice interview with Professor Chris Verhoef of VU University. The interviewers, Herbert Blankesteijn and Ben van der Burg, were surprised to find that COBOL is not bad and is very good for programming administrative automation processes. Legacy is not an issue. Not allowing time for maintenance is a management issue. He mentioned the Lindy effect which tells us that the life expectancy of old code increases with time. The established code is anti-fragile.

COBOL 60 by one of the early adopters, Wim Ebbinkhuijsen

Post published:May 18, 2020
Post category:COBOL
Reading time:1 mins read

This year COBOL was delivered 60 years ago as one of the first general purpose, cross-platform programming languages.

On 8 January 1960 the ‘COBOL Executive Committee’ formally approved the design of the programming language “COBOL 60”.

One of the very early adopters of COBOL in the Netherlands, and long time member of the COBOL standard, Wim Ebbinkhuijsen, did a very nice talk at the event organized by Ordina. He went through the history of COBOL through the past 60 years. As a close observer and influencer of the programming language you get a great insight in this recent history of computing. Slides can be found here.

Compile and run a COBOL program on z/OS – A mini-tutorial

Post published:September 7, 2019
Post category:COBOL
Reading time:2 mins read

With this mini-tutorial you may get a quick start with COBOL on z/OS. It gives you a handson overview of the process to get a COBOL program running on z/OS.

The tutorial will show you how to create a Hello World COBOL program on z/OS, compile it and then run in. You can find the program itseld and the JCL scripts for the compilation and run attached below to this post.

The following video describes the process