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Your feelings regarding the language being designed for use by accountants/corporate are completely correct. COBOL was originally designed to be very verbose for this exact reason (i.e. to make COBOL programs accessible/readable for business folk).

I’m a programmer but personally I like the verbosity of COBOL. I like self-documenting code. The code I write in other languages often ends up being pretty wordy too. Certainly there can be a long debate about how verbose programs should be.

I wouldn’t say that COBOL is terrible and deserves to die for this design decision though, especially when it outperforms other languages in the places that really matter (i.e. doing business transactions quickly and accurately).

For what it’s worth, it’s possible to make COBOL less verbose. Standard COBOL syntax is still getting updated (iirc the last standard COBOL update was in 2023). These updates have often made keywords that were otherwise mandatory before optional. If you add COBOL dialects to the mix you can get code which is very similar to other languages depending on which dialect you choose.

In what way is it terrible?

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When it comes to COBOL developers, there are a lot of developers retiring but there are also a lot of programmers being trained in COBOL every year. It’s for this reason that the average age of COBOL developers has stayed roughly the same for the past 2 decades despite retirements.

But that said the total number of COBOL developers is decreasing overall, which is an issue.

Not many young programmers want to learn COBOL. COBOL isn’t taught in many educational institutions. There are very few online resources that programmers can use to self-teach COBOL.

It’s a shame. COBOL is great for it’s specific use case but it isn’t very “accessible” in that regard when compared to other languages.

I’m a COBOL developer. For old COBOL systems it’s not just a case of it being expensive to “migrate away”, it’s extremely risky and for no significant benefit.

Businesses have essentially two options, modernize what they already have, or tear everything apart and start from scratch. COBOL programs don’t “just work”, they’re good at what they need to do (business transactions). Therefore, there isn’t a significant need to rewrite everything, especially when it’s possible to modernize and reuse existing business logic contained within COBOL programs. For example, COBOL programs aren’t tied to old hardware, you can run your COBOL applications on the cloud instead. This is much safer and cheaper than rewriting everything.

I would say I’m a very ideals-driven person as well. I had hoped to get a job with a company whose values aligned with my own upon graduating.

My experience was that it was really difficult getting my first job when I was being fussy with who I was sending my applications to. This is despite having both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree with the highest possible grades and also industry experience.

Eventually I gave in and started sending applications to all sorts of companies and took the first job I got offered. I’m still early in my career and I’m still working with this company.

Honestly I think for a first job it’s just worth taking whatever comes your way if it will offer you valuable experience. Then you can always apply for other jobs whilst you’re earning money and experience. That’s my plan anyway.

Other than that, I would recommend checking out this website: https://80000hours.org/

I often think about the learning pyramid and I find it lines up with my personal experiences.

The experiences which have made me better at programming are when I’m teaching others or when I’ve been working on projects in my spare time (practicing).

For example whilst I was still at university I decided to make a Discord chatbot and it really helped me build on what I’d already been taught.

Other than that I like reading coding standards documents, like this.

I encounter something similar to this often.

There’s a lot of cookie banners where “Accept All Cookies” is a single button but in order to reject cookies you have to press a “Manage Cookies” link which will have something similar to a “Reject All Cookies” button in it.

It’s very annoying.

Yes this would make sense.

Quote from “What methods can we use to obtain consent?”:

If you are asking for consent electronically, consent must be “not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided”. You need to ensure you adopt the most user-friendly method you can.

For a website, hiding rejection behind a link should class as “unnecessarily disruptive”. If you can provide consent with the press of a single button then rejecting should also be the press of a single button.

I think you’re referring to healthline: https://anon.healthline.com/

Not allowing users to access a service at all unless they accept cookies is often against GDPR. See: Can we use ‘cookie walls’?.

To quote:

In some circumstances, this approach is inappropriate; for example, where the user or subscriber has no genuine choice but to sign up. This is because the UK GDPR says that consent must be freely given.

If your use of a cookie wall is intended to require, or influence, users to agree to their personal data being used by you or any third parties as a condition of accessing your service, then it is unlikely that user consent is considered valid.

The key is that individuals are provided with a genuine free choice; consent should not be bundled up as a condition of the service unless it is necessary for that service.

These cookie banners often violate all sorts of GDPR rules even more explicitly than this example. For example did you know it’s not allowed to have pre-ticked boxes on cookie popups for non-essential cookies?

Using AI to refractor COBOL code sounds interesting to me, as the article highlights this may make it easier for COBOL code to be reused by making the code more modular and having it be called by other languages (e.g. having a Java API which calls COBOL code). But of course as other people in this thread have mentioned there are huge risks to rewriting mission-critical code.

I’m not convinced about rewriting COBOL code as Java. COBOL is very good and efficient at performing the tasks that businesses need, such as extremely large quantities of precise numerical calculations and transactions. Java doesn’t excel at this.