I started writing in COBOL in 1976. I wrote a lot of code and even started teaching COBOL in the local community college. The language is pretty simple, although wordy. I think that COBOL code would be pretty obvious to a coder today. They might not be able to code in it, but they should be able to follow the flow. The advantage of COBOL was that it was closer to machine code. A statement in COBOL translates to one or a few instructions of machine language. COBOL was a sort of assembly language. This made it run fast and efficiently on the big iron IBM mainframes. Remember that a machine with a meg or less memory had to run hundreds of terminals serving users at the same time at a clock speed measured in in a few millions of CPS.
My last job before I retired was translating COBOL to Java. The COBOL code always ran faster than the Java classes that replaced them.
My first job out of school was programming in COBOL. Never learned it in school. I knew C, Scheme, Pascal, BASIC, a little FORTRAN, and maybe a couple of others. COBOL was easy to pick up. Never did really get JCL.
The time sharing wasn't that great. Yes the there were hundreds of users but they could wait many seconds, even minutes for transactions to run. There was a little clock icon on the status line of the terminal, and I easily spent an hour or more per day just watching that clock, waiting on my terminal to update. Luckily the there was no www then, or I would have been surfing during that time and even less productive.
> Remember that a machine with a meg or less memory had to run hundreds of terminals
(Puts Monty Python voice on)....Piffle!...when I were a lad we looked after a bunch of Data General Nova 4's and Eclipse S/130's with 32k of memory and with 32-64 dasher terminals hanging off them running DG's Interactive Cobol (on top of RDOS)....and running a full-on accounting system. 1MB of memory would have been absolute luxury.
I learned COBOL, Fortran and RPG II in school but only professionally did anything in RPG II. COBOL readability beat the heck out of trying to read RPG!
