Vacation

So, I’ve taken a brief trip to Calgary. I’ve been casually going through this amazing book, allegedly the bible of C programming: ‘The C Programming Language (2ed, Kernighan/Ritchie).’ It’s been a decent read, and C is a personal favourite of mine, not because I know it well in any way, but because of what it has been used to build in the past, namely all the Unix-y underpinnings of today’s software world.

At the suggestion of a good friend, I’ve also considered investing a bit of time in COBOL, which I previously dismissed as an antiquated, dried-up language of yesterday. He made quite the case for it- COBOL is allegedly still used in 80+% of the world’s business data processing applications, and many of the programmers who originally wrote and maintained the code are retiring or moving up to management. In his words, “You can make a ton of money programming in COBOL because banks still use it for everything.” After some light research, I totally agree. Erik, if you’re reading this, contact me on github, we can learn together.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID.  TinyProgram.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DisplayGreeting.
   DISPLAY "Hello, world!".
   STOP RUN.

It’s quite funny how english-like COBOL is. Line endings are periods rather than semicolons.I expected much worse. Guess I gotta challenge all my other preconceived notions regarding programming now.

Thanks for reading.