I am 30 years old and COBOL was the first Programming language I learnt in my company. I was a COBOL Programmer for nearly 10 years. Leaving that company and learning real programming languages was like a caveman entering a city in the 20th century
That's crazy. Did you work for an investment bank? I'm guessing you got a job straight out of college. I used to work at Bear Sterns with a bunch of COBOL programmers.
Vrunda ONE well this vid and the news has got me considering it but first I've got to find evidence of remotework/consulting opportunities where I dictate terms and pay.
@@katech6020 it was intended it's sarcasm ! It forecasts the life cycle of a cobol programmer My OOP teacher once said to us in class i won't accept a cobol job even if they pay me $50K/month
COBOL by definition was never intended to be a good computer science language. It was business oriented. Easy to write and maintain (for the times) by programmers coming from a business background.
@Butt Cube C doesn't cripple the mind. I don't see how you can say that. C++ is clearly the leading cause of involuntary commitment among programmers though.
I made a living at it for forty years. The last place I worked is in their fifteenth year of a five-year plan to get off the mainframe. It's hard to justify spending tons of money to replace software with new software to do the exact same thing. P.S. Columns 73-80 were intended for the program name on punched cards, 1 - 6 for sequence numbers, in case you dropped the deck. But after source code software came along, that wasn't needed. P.P.S. COBOL was designed for basic business record-keeping done with batch processing (jobs that usually ran overnight). It was later adapted to handle online processing. Much of the business world still uses mainframes to do the work. Your bank probably has a modern looking front-end to display on your phone or browser, but it is still based on mainframe processes behind the scenes.
I was in Industrial Engineering in my 20s in 1981. I bought an Apple II with my tax refund - no disk drive or printer, not enough cash. I had previously put an incentive payroll system on a 4 bit processor equipped Monroe desktop machine with 4K of ram all in machine code. So learning the Apple was easy. I automated some of the office tasks that took tons of work just to see if I could, brought it in to the office to show them. A few people from the IT dept. came by and checked it out. A couple weeks later they offered me a job in IT coding Cobol. I told them I didn't know it, they said no problem we will train you. I watched 21 Deltak courses on video in 19 days with workbooks (with graded tests, you couldn't go to the next one if you didn't pass the test). Then I was given a small program to code and after a few fumbles it worked. They insisted on structured programming. I became proficient in Cobol and received raises, in 3 years I doubled my salary from Industrial Engineering. Sadly, after 177 years of business the company folded and I had to change jobs. Learned to code online Cobol programs under CICS, wrote over 100 programs as part of an order/inventory/shipping system. PCs were still my first love and as they grew in number set up our first small network then later a company wide intranet with 150 attached PCs and was promoted to Network Administrator and set up systems to transfer data from the network to the mainframe and vice versa, later changing this to network to Unix system running Oracle. Retired from this position. Cobol was never my favorite, but it provided shelter and food for my family and was usually relatively easy to debug if it crashed. Early on I was the "on call" person for night time batch jobs so I'd get a call at 3 am to fix a crash, usually for a program I didn't write. But the structured code helped enormously and it usually didn't take too long to get it fixed so I could return home. One side story - when I was on night call, I got a call for a system that I wasn't responsible for and I questioned this. I was told that the person responsible was there but needed help and it was related to a system in my domain. So I went in, and the reason help was needed was because the other guy (who was near retirement age) had been in a bar with his wife until 2 am and was very drunk. He managed some non-IBM machines that interfaced to the mainframe and then the programs I was over processed the data. There had been a change in those machines and some bad (non numeric) data came in and crashed the Cobol program. I told him the field in question and he immediately knew how to fix it. So he goes to the keyboard linking to his machines and sits there a minute and then asks me if I can put his hands on the keyboard because he couldn't do it. I did so but was sure this wasn't going to work - if you can't find the keyboard how can you possibly change and compile a program? Sonavabitch - he did it! Clean compile first time, good data coming through. I offered to drive him home but he declined. I was really worried that he would wreck but he was at work the next day, vehicle intact.
how do modern backend languages like say java, c#, node, python etc interact with mainframe? Say I go to my bank website and the frontend makes an api call to their backend java microservice to fetch my account balance. But from there how does this java microservice call/fetch/execute mainframe/cobol code and get my account balance to be displayed on frontend?
@@blasttrash there are tools like cics or ims that are an interface for the backend to interact with the mainframe. Nowadays things like java and c run on the mainframes but for things like db2 programming cobol and interfaces are used. So in your example the frontend would send the request for your bank status to the backend which in turn use the interface with cics and / or ims to get your bank balance.
Having been educated in my college's computer science department, I held my nose and took a course on COBOL from the business department. That decision lead to recruitment as an intern programmer writing IMS COBOL and three months later as a full-time programmer. A few years later, I learned MVS macro-assembler language, spending a few years as a technical support analyst, eventually spending a nearly 30-years as a system software developer. Oh yes, I took that intern job writing COBOL in the summer of 1977. Finally, computer languages have their strengths and weaknesses and COBOL's strength is report formatting.
jaikumar848 During the 1980's in the USA, business executives stayed in touch with each other with mobile devices known as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs for short). PDAs were marketed as a secretary in your pocket, so to speak. In modern times, you would use a widget suite, or Google Calendar 🗓 on your cell phone, tablet, or personal computer.
COBOL would be an ideal language for coding on a mobile device itself (as opposed to say developing your apps in something like Android Studio on a PC). Since COBOL syntax is made up of English words, it would be much easier to code using gesture typing than other languages, which use a lot of punctuation symbols, which doesn't exactly play to the strengths of the mobile "keyboard."
The amazing thing about COBOL is that there are no libraries to learn. So once you know the language, you know *everything*. That means that you get to code your own XML/Json parsers from scratch. In COBOL! It's awesome!
You don't have to write your own parsers if you use "XML Thunder" for example. However, since cobol version 6 you have the "json parse" and "xml parse" keywords built into the language itself, making it even simpler.
Because even today about 50% of the world business and many government agencies run on COBOL. All together several hundred million lines of code. And there are very very few people who knows how to maintain or even to read that code.
I wrote COBOL programs 35 years ago, some of them are probably still running. I take great pride in telling people that I write legacy software. There's nothing wrong with it, just a bit verbose.
What do COBOL programmers do nowadays? Are they fixing bugs? Shouldn't all bugs have been caught out and fixed by now, in a codebase as old as the one you left behind? Or are there adjustments required by eg. reinstalling such code onto new, replaced hardware?
@@xeon39688 Because that would requirier them to recreate everything that is currently done in COBOL in a different language which is stupidly expensive for very little gain from the companies point of view.
I had to take a year of programming in COBOL in high school. I went from getting straight A's in BASIC the year before to failing my first quarter of COBOL. I buckled down and got an A for the rest of the year. But I hated it. It was the only programming language where you would have to type in three to four pages of code to create a half page report. You compile your code and have three errors. Fix those three errors and get 97 errors on the next compile. I now have been programming professionally for 35 years and fortunately have not had to write one line of Cobol.
I’m learning COBOL currently (before you ask why it’s because I’m passionate about legacy computers) and it’s not THAT bad so far. The most frustrating things so far is the archaic way Cobol reads data off files, and the fact that if you miss a single ‘.’ ANYWHERE the whole code has an absolute meltdown. Also having to define every variable in a table/array manually, then defining the table/array using the DEFINES clause is a tremendous pain in the ass.
@@ZemanTheMighty Completely agree, i was pretty good in COBOL back i the day 40 years back. My favorite language would be C or C# now. I think on of the the biggest issue many have then never really learned COBOL and use it as best as they can. For report HIGHLY recommend learning the RD (Report Description) if memory serves me. All to often i saw many fighting with generating reports, think 80-90% of all my programs is did were reports. Those not using the RD would spend days with print spacing charts, and running, printing, debugging over and over and over. With an RD pretty much sit down learn the layout and done.... Provided you know how to use and RD. And honestly even though c/c# are my favorites, still liked teh 66,77, or 88 level variables. I did COBOL as mentioned almost 40 years back now, one evening i was at a friend's house and watching him work on what was at the time MS-DOS, ya he worked at $icroMoft as is did later on, but watching him work on a PC was like WOW, that is a hell of a lot easier and started making the move from mainframes and some work i did on a CRAY for a while to a PC. The ease of working on a PC was so much better.... Just hope the tools for COBOL are better now. I remember a friend bought Micro Focus Cobol, not ever sure if they are still around. It seems it make COBOL a bit easy, and honestly didn't like how verbose it was... But overall other then "Why does the F&$king '.' need to be a line/statement terminator... Can't have a smaller character...? Guess one reason i like C as much as i did it used a semicolon and a lot bigger then a period...
@@charlesgantz5865 Ya sounds right, might argue possibly 3 pages of the good old large pages (11" x 17") if i'm remembering correctly. Back in the old days it wouldn't be uncommon the previous print job left the printer in an unknown state. So the three pages were a form feed to get the printer to a known state, while when i stated in the 80's most everyone would by common best practice would do a form feed. so the first page i was suggesting may often not be needed... Than a banner page as you normally worked in a batch environment and had to identify your print job, and was nice people would deliver the print out to your desk... And often the extra blank page them may not have been needed, the operation people would remove it before you ever say it... And the rest or only the one page that was your output however billions of pages it might be... 🤡
As someone once wrote: There are two types of fool. The first says “This is old and therefore good”, and the other says “This is new and therefore better”
past me: i'll learn BASIC also past me: ...and HTML, and Visual Basic and JAVA present me: can't they just let all the swift and minecraft types loose on these problems?
Cobol is so toxic language if you program in cobol you will always SHOUT TO PEOPLE (İts funny maybe there is a video just teacher shouts the reserved words)
@@nadavln3797x86 assembler is BRAIN DEAD. Its MUCH easier in a mainframe. Wtf is a stack pointer? No need for it. Why limit to 1 register for math? Why is the addr bus 20 bit on a 16 bit machine? Why give tour register so many names? (RAX. RAHN RAL) very stupid Been writing mainframe assembly since 1968. X86 is a toy and very inefficient.
@@steves9250 I think when I was learning FORTRAN back in the day (1997, ha), we may have had column limits. I remember having to FTP my code up and then compile and link it and then run it on the old VAX terminals. Good times.
@@lboston4660 Hey, thanks for sparing time to reply to my comment. I'm referring to majority of the the computers currently being used...I have 0 knowledge about mainframes..Maybe if you could help me out..
I have been working with COBOL in some capacity for 22 years now. I know it gets shit on by the cool kids but like Jason Vorhees it just refuses to die!
todd herron this video makes you want to code in COBOL??? It makes me want to issue corrections. This guy apparently got his information from other than hands on practice. But it is fairly easy to learn. Even the simplest languages can build complex programs. Maybe not good ones, but definitely complex. One of the programs that I frequently had to maintain was over 13,000 lines of COBOL code.
Vaibhav Kumar because coding in COBOL is boring. I coded in COBOL for years and was frequently frustrated by the limitations of the language. However, since then COBOL has been improved upon several times. As other commenters stated, it can process XML and call java and C programs. Yes, mainframes (at least the ones running z/OS) can run POSIX compliant stuff and present a Unix prompt interface. It has probably improved in the 6 years since I retired. The big problem is grasping what the 10,000 plus lines of code are doing not the task of understanding the language. At one point, I installed a database client using X-Windows (the mainframe being the X server or client-i could never keep those straight) because the installer had been set up to run universally.
Because you are mostly working on legacy systems that were created maybe 30 or more years ago and most of the time it is just a mess of spaghetti code which is very frustating. Programms with nearly 20k lines of code which 1000 of edits through the years. Maintenance is a nightmare.
Cobol in batch isn't hard, but it's not simple. You have to understand how to make it interact with the OS. That requires JCL and Procs. If what you code in your program isnt supported in your JCL and the systems master catalog, your program will abend. If you've ever tried to figure out a SOC4, it can make you weep. Assuming the company you work for didn't cheap out, you may a tool that helps you solve abends. If not, you will have a lovely (read "impossible") time trying to figure out how to read a "dump"...assuming you can find anyone to help, you get to add and subtract in hexadecimal once you know and find the appropriate bits.
i agree it's alright, i think it's too verbose. I would spend a part of my six digit salary and hire a typist and dictate cobol. the Hardest and useful thing to program is assembly imo.
It's not that hard actually, I've been working with cobol for the past 4 years, and it's pretty easy compared to other languages. It's not object oriented, so it's simple to implement, and works well. There are programs running without errors or intervention for decades... All the banks and financial companies in my country uses Cobol.
@@Set_Abominae Wasn't there an object oriented version of COBOL II from IBM in the late 90's - I think I remember looking at it and thinking "why?". Each class was almost a standalone program.
I live in New Jersey, an hour after hearing my governor calling for COBOL programmers, I started to research and plan how to learn it. One morbidly verbose online tutorial and one day of figuring out how to run a virtual mainframe along with setting up its 3270 virtual terminal, I've gotten a decent "Hello World" out of it. :-)
How did that go? It's brutally difficult to get entry level programming jobs these days even with a degree. I've been toying with the idea of COBOL but I'm also wondering if there's like a minimum experience requirement to break into "entry level" jobs.
@@jayspeidell I contacted the appropriate number that the governor mentioned; mind you, he literally said that the unemployment system was backed up so heavily they were desperate to find anyone who’d work with COBOL . . . I never heard back. It was a long shot but worth the try.
In my opinion Cobol is a very easy language, which you can master in 1 or 2 month, if you have programming knowledge. Very Special is the control-break algorithm and the sort algorithm in cobol.
@@jayspeidell These days, it seems like most places no longer accept "self taught" experience at all, nor unpaid internships. If you weren't getting _paid, by a company that was not yourself,_ to write on someone's computer, then you have "no experience".
if you learn COBOL you will definitely have a lot of job opportunities. Everyone learns the new languages now, but there is a lot of demand for developers able to work on legacy systems. its so bad that some companies are begging retired programmers to come out of retirement to fix a problem for them. So if you learn COBOL or any other legacy language, expect to work on number of old systems, doing very specific things that there is just no modern replacement to.
The issue is that even if you learn COBOL you’d be useless in most of these code bases. There are also different versions of COBOL like COBOL II and III. Some are different depending on the mainframe. And it’s not just COBOL you will also need to learn things like JCL and CICS. There is a whole stack and there isn’t a ton of info about it anymore. Oh and you know there are COBOL code bases that are 50+ years old and billions of lines of code. So uh good luck
Former COBOL Coder here. COBOL is as interesting as an old yellow brick. BUT, it does it's job REALLY WELL. It handles records that are SOMEWHAT readable by humans. It crunches those basic math numbers and sorts the lists of customers with APLOMB. That's all it does. It takes a record that could well have been on something like a 3x5 card...matches it with like records, extracts the data important to the users, and puts it somewhere they can use it. You don't always need a racehorse or even an exotic unicorn. Sometimes, you JUST NEED A MULE.
I wasn’t crazy about it either but when I entered the market in the 80’s, it was my best bet. I got away from coding in it after about 3 years and flipped to the side of installing software on the mainframe after 5 which meant I was then supporting the flood of questions from a too rapidly growing, primarily COBOL writing, department. Ah, fun times.
I went to college in 1986-1988, it was assember, cobol, rpg II, pl1. Other secondary languages they taught us were fortran, pascal, and APL, which were on the way out (pascal was never really used in business, mostly used in universities). Used cobol extensively from 1988-1993 when we started converting to client/server. pc's couldn't do much back in the day, and a unix server was expensive and slow. mainframes and minis were still fast if you have 50-5000 people hammering in transacations.
@@jimchabai3163 I heard if you like math, modern APL is a nice hobby language to have now days. One thing is for sure: I wasn't built to mess around with APL.
I have been working on COBOL since 2011 when I got my first job out of college. It is my favorite language I have ever learned. This video obviously oversimplifies the language to fulfill some weird vendetta, but it is without a doubt still in very high demand.
Is it feasible for modern professional software developers to learn COBOL development in say one year and be able to offer value or is it a language and programming environment that takes many years to get to a professional level? Asking for a friend.
At my first job, my supervisor was a guy somewhere in his 60's who had programmed many of our legacy COBOL programs himself in the nineties. He was very confused as to why I found the language incredibly frustrating to work with, since "it's just english".
I ran into the same problem, my COBOL mentor said they hated modern languages because they do too much stuff for you. Once you have read through massive amounts of COBOL though its design does start making sense weirdly
That's how I started my career at a large bank 🏦 And honestly, the only thing you can't use it for Is web/mobile services. But rest assured that all the heavy number crunching and processes from request API are sent to the mainframe backend to get processed because it's still the core of many enterprises processes.
Actually, COBOL can be used for web services. I used CICS (transactional system) and COBOL for a proof of concept in the 90’s for adding a web interface to our mainframe COBOL programs.
@@kolive81 I guess, when he sais "can't use it for web/mobile services", he actually means that there is no publicly available, well-known library or framework for it
Depending on the compiler and the machine it's running on... I wrote an error-correcting file transfer protocol (with automatic reconnect) on minicomputers in COBOL in 1977. Had to use auto redial because 1200 baud tended to drop.
Comfortably retired at age 54 after 30 years as a COBOL programmer. Haters gonna hate, but it was a fun ride. PS I was one of the guys that saved the world from the Y2K bug. You're welcome.
I took one semester of COBOL in college and I really enjoyed it. The funny thing was that even though I got a C in the class, I felt like I learned everything. That class really helped me to think logically and I was still using broad principles I learned in there 20 years later (to solve computer problems).
@@michaelinhouston9086 I think that's the best part of learning any procedural computer language. You have to figure out how to solve the problem before you can make the computer do it. One you know it's just syntax after that.
@@spacemeter3001 Dead serious. I even had the absolute pleasure of maintaining PL/1 applications in my old department (old IBM mainframe language). Being a CS student, it was not the most lucrative situation, so I switched to another department working with modern technologies instead.
this is true , most of the old banks are still running their systems on Cobol , they cant migrate because they are sensitive data relates to people money
Yes, I can attest this. Maybe of old legacy core system are literally running COBOL due to IBM’s supremacy back then. Why you think IBM still around eh?
And if you are a senior COBOL programmer, its easy to get insane amounts of money in salary. It became the "nobody will learn so we got pay the big bank to the one that still know"
Slight error. The punch card has 80 columns. Columns 73-80 were usually used to number your cards. Why? In case you dropped your desk or cards on the way to the punch card reader.
Most of the United State's unemployment systems are still currently written in COBOL, so while it is an antiquated programming language, the few of those that do still know it can make an absolute crap load of money for their services.
Banks and insurance companies all over the world also still use COBOL. In my country though it's mostly been maintenance with little new code written, so it gets outsourced to cheaper countries.
Lol yeah I work at a company that sells COBOL compilers for mainframe and pc and hearing and seeing the guys who work on cobol so there jobs makes me appreciate why we get paid so much ( I work on similarly outdated tech that is business critical). They work with banks that kick off because they made dividing by zero throw an exception rather than do nothing as well as other customers using other weird undefined bits of behaviour.
I'm not so sure about that. New Jersey is using COBOL in their unemployment processing but I heard they are looking for "volunteers." I've checked into that, there's rarely much money in "volunteering."
When I told my mother I was learning to code on my own last year, she told me about the courses of COBOL and the punching cards that existed back when she was young. She's 66 now. 😁
In college the big challenge was to find a keypunch machine that was not being used. At my college they were put in any vacant spot - my favorite was in a small room under a stairwell - those machines were almost always available.
COBOL is the simple part Managing the JCL and other mainframe tasks to compile and put into production is where the mastery is. This is mission critical, high throughput stuff running on 70's PC design, working with 40 years of production libraries and hacks.
I took a programming class that used COBOL. Once you figure out it's unusual syntax it's actually just modular programming. You write the modules and a main module. The main module then calls the modules you wrote. The biggest problem with COBOL is that almost no one teaches it any more.
@@StellaEFZ Thing is, if you had to decide between a candidate that had absolutely zero experience in COBOL vs a candidate who has taken introductory classes into COBOL, therefore understanding the basics of the language, which would you pick?
@@atomfusion231 I'm not saying to ignore people who know or who doesn't know, I'd pick the one who has the most experience 100%, esp since COBOL is basically black magic
I just would like to thank you for providing such good and simple explanations about what things are, things that I have no time to fully read about but that I still want to know about. Thank you, I hope you will keep up the good work
Yeah... this dude is an ijit. Stopping in column 72 was because there was a sequence number in 73-80..especially important when your program lived on Hollerith 80 column cards.
The cobol language is a small fraction of what you need to know. A lot of database IO predates SQL so there is a lot to know there. You have to know how to compile and link your program. How to use job control language. Is your job running interactive or batch. How to display info on the screen and accept data entry. Calling another program, submitting a batch job.
Steve Richter Yes. You really know Comun Bussines Oriented Language. I became a Senior programmer because I learn it in 1978. Many years later l was using it with Structured Query Language. I worked with IBM 360-H-40 in the beggining. Then I used WANG systems. But in the begining you had to be a system mainframes operator with knowlege of JCL. Job Control Language. I also learned RPG l ll lll Report Program Generator. Almost 20 years ago I was a Data Processing Manager I also knew Formula Translator Program. God bless you.
@@admirableemanuelaquila9763 I started programming maybe in 1982 on an IBM AS400. Back then it was called the S/38. Mostly RPG. It was easy enough to work with COBOL when we had to.
Steve Richter Yes Remember those computers. Today I begin to listen videos about COBOL. To Remember My first Language is spanish and I was learnining english in 1977/1978. And also COBOL. Ha ha. God bless u
I regret that you did not mention the role of the rear admiral Grace Hopper at the origin of COBOL The divisions were used to clearly separate data from procedure, long before OO started talking about state and behavior. Also, the identification division contains metadata (information about the program), a concept that appeared in modern computer languages much much later.
I met Adm Hopper briefly at the Washington Navy Yard; just passing in the passageway. No time to chat with me but it was awesome meeting a living legend in person.
The reason is also that they tried a Harvard code architecture with COBOL, so that the source of the data is completely irrelevant for the program that runs it. In that time necessary, as the data was stored on big replaceable tape drives or "hard drives" or even punch cards. Also the computers were slow so they needed to assure, that one process wouldn't change data another program was working with at that moment. Nowadays this architecture becomes relevant again for PCs because of multicore multithread calculations - when you have seperate cores using the data the data should be inside the program secured from being changed while a process runs it
In the *Dilbert* comic strip chat on Disqus, someone mentioned that 75% of projects to replace legacy systems fail. As a result, managers are reluctant to start projects that replace legacy systems. And that's why so many COBOL legacy systems are still around.
In a chat room, someone mentioned that although a CPU might have instructions that support decimal (BCD,) arithmetic, few modern languages directly use that support for fixed-point decimal numbers. Someone replied that's a reason some managers of departments who code accounting applications still like COBOL.
I once worked on a large Java project that had been converted from COBOL. Many of the Java programs felt like COBOL because they used a translator that replaced COBOL with references to Java classes. In my mind, it would have been just as well as to have kept some of it COBOL. The named fields in the COBOL file layout were more descriptive than record offsets
@@jamesfunk7614 It's kind of surprising for me that fixed-point decimal is not a built-in data type in most programming languages. Graydon Hoare wantet it for Rust, but it never happened.
I'm a COBOL developer, really love the language, has a certain style to it tbh, but not much scope in advancing my career, would probably change domains soon.
I love educational straight to the point comic videos, keep them up please, I'm still postponing the 4hr python tutorial and that's my only real objective during the lockdown...
I learned COBOL in 1975. When I was 46 in I was made redundant from my job as director of operations on a newspaper. I got a job based on my COBOL experience. I think there have been changes so that you can use Object Orientation with COBOL as well as SQL (which wasn't available when I first learned).
Problems solving by computer programming is the most satisfying sensation I can get. If you're lucky (and repeat repeat repeat), sometimes it can even get close to art!
I've worked with a program that used max 80 character data blocks. The reason was the same: punch cards. They weren't used actively anymore, but compatibility had to be maintained. The actual program had been upgraded over the years. The last time before me was in the 70s. Fun times.
i think i need to go back to school... COBOL was developed over 100 years ago in 1959 and still used in 2020... Right off the bat i can tell this video is going to be golden...
Disclosure: I'm a retired mainframe sysprog. I have never done anything in COBOL, and would not do so by choice given my current interests. But... COBOL is actually very good at doing the narrow range of things it was designed to do, and was particularly so in its time. It is in no way a general purpose language, and was never meant to be. If all I was doing was maintaining a ledger database by batch or online transactions, and producing reports, then I might put COBOL into contention for my language.
Also a retired sysprog. Never learned COBOL, I was always an assembler guy. You could do so much more, and write much more efficient code. If someone came to me for help with a COBOL bug, I would always ask them to provide the assembler output from the COBOL compiler so I could quickly diagnose using a memory dump! Dabbled a bit in FORTAN and PL/1, but never did much real coding with them. And btw, assembler gurus are also in demand, at bigger salaries than the COBOL folks!
I worked in an IBM shop where the the code was written in either COBOL on mainframe or RPG II (another archaism) on the midrange systems. Trouble is we also had a DEC VAX to run one very important system. IBM terminals used synchronous comms and the VAX used asynchronous comms to VT100 style terminals. Short story is that I wrote a 3000 line COBOL VT100 emulator to allow the VAX terminals to be output on synch. terminal network. It mostly worked!
"every program is structured with an easy-to-follow hierarchy" is the kind of thing someone might claim when they've never had to amend a COBOL program that is unstructured spaghetti code.
i love that in the specific case of COBOL the program doesn't runs and jeff just refuses to elaborate further, just wrapping things up at that point as per his normal video flow ROFL pure gold
Even the logic behind the 72 column limit was silly. If COBOL line numbers were on the left, why leave space on the right for more line numbers? when i was coding on the mainframe, 73-80 was typically for line numbers and the editor doesn’t display them. By the time punch cards were left behind, that 80 column limit was so ingrained that people couldn’t think about longer lines. In the old, old times, 73-80 were sequence numbers used for sorting the cards if they perchance got dropped. There was a machine that could sort the cards into the right order. Clearly, mechanical sort was superior to electronic sorting after the file was read in??? Beats me, it was before my time.
Love how the most played section is going back to review why it just errors out and throws syntax errors. The audio that overlays that is golden though. Awesome.
"... the reason we don't go beyond 72 columns is because your code needs to fit onto a physical punch card." I programmed a production program in COBOL, basically just once, in 1984. It's good to see that some things never change. However, it's not good to see that this thing has not changed.
I worked as a programmer for 30 years using COBOL and various assembler languages. After I retired, I took a degree in computing which meant learning more exciting languages such as C, C++ and Lisp. Later on, I got on to other declarative languages like Haskell and am now looking at APL which is as far from COBOL as you can get.
I remember reading a “If computer languages were vehicles” piece where APL was something like “a double decker bus that quickly takes rows and columns of data to their destination, but the instruments and controls are all labeled in Greek. Backwards.”.
Just curious, if you were to offer your services as a COBOL developer do you think you could make a lot more than what you would make as a Haskell or APL developer? I'm wondering if the myth about COBOL developers being in such high demand is true.
I learned and used COBOL starting in 1978. About 45 years ago. Used big iron IBM 360-40. Columns 73 to 80 were for a sequence number if you dropped the card deck. The scrambled cards would be placed into a sorter, up to eight times to put them back in order! lol My eyes are tearing up from laughing at some of the things we did! This was a throw back to Assembler. BALR to all my peers.
Guys, the most amazing thing about this is that we get it. If you're a fireship fan it's likely that you're working hard daily to get better and learn some level of code. And the fact that we get this means it's working! Show this to most your friends and they'll have no clue what they're looking at! We're doing it guys!!!!
I'm not a programmer, and I'm not interested in programming, but I was born in the 60s and grew up with computers in the 70s and '80s and I actually knew what the acronym for COBOL stood for, so I clicked... Once I got into the video, I realized what I hate about almost every other video on RUclips... ...most videos on RUclips have a 1 to 2 minute introduction where the RUclipsr tells you what he/she is going to tell you, then they feel that they have to have some intro credits to brand the video, then you get the old "please like and subscribe to the video and click the bell to get notified for new videos" section. Now that we're two or three minutes into the video, most videos actually start... You are different and way better, because you get right to it. Within the first 5 seconds of this video you tell me what COBOL is and what the acronym stands for (even though I didn't need it) and then you get right into the guts of the presentation. I love it! Keep up the great work.
Mainframe with cobol:Pleace rewrite me in newer language and let me die I've been running for more time than you're zoomer workers were walking on this earth Companies: Haha mainframe with cobol goes brrrrrrrr.
A large aerospace company used COBOL on their 'big iron' to design wiring harnesses in world-class airplanes. After the big iron was retired the millions of lines of COBOL code were migrated to Linux boxes (Windoze & relational db's were too slow) and its still working today.
Thanks for a good humored and informative video. But I gotta tell you that new versions of Cobol try to keep in touch with conputer language advances like object-oriented programming and event-driven programming for GUI.
@@Studio1XN TO: aufsturz & Smug Anime Girl - all I can say is the sweet bliss of youth. You can google this one yourself, there are over 220 BILLION lines of Cobol in existence (production) today. My first programming language was Assembler (the best language ever written) but it didn't take many lines to create your programs (heck you didn't have the memory). I followed up with Cobol in the late 70s. I maintained programs that were 3000 PAGES long (not lines but PAGES). Ahh the joy of 'procedural' programming.
@@vlc-cosplayer TO: aufsturz & Smug Anime Girl - all I can say is the sweet bliss of youth. You can google this one yourself, there are over 220 BILLION lines of Cobol in existence (production) today. My first programming language was Assembler (the best language ever written) but it didn't take many lines to create your programs (heck you didn't have the memory). I followed up with Cobol in the late 70s. I maintained programs that were 3000 PAGES long (not lines but PAGES). Ahh the joy of 'procedural' programming.
I think it's safe to say more lines of Javascript or Python will be written _this month_ than there will be lines of COBOL for the duration of its existence.
@@dwill123 Assembly.... and Basic+ those were the days. 3000 pages of someone ELSES code makes you crazy I understand that. Cobol was not a fun progamming language for me at all in college. These guys don't understand anything that adds numbers like wall street, most banks, the US and most of the states uses Cobol and most of the things that control like all utilities are still running on Unix or the very early Linux as ladder logic controllers.
Back around the 70's, I think, for the company for which I worked, I purchased some COBOL business software (purchasing, sales, payroll, etc) but managed to arrange access to the source code to enable me to write job costing software for the company -which made bespoke springs and pressings. I recall my first program compiled with hundreds of errors 'cos I forgot to put full stops at the end of program lines! And the verbosity of variables ! Later I think I solved the Y2K problem by adding 50 to the year portion of the date then testing whether it overflowed its two digits. I'm 83 now, but still recall the thrill of replacing that legacy system that used hand-written entries on Job cards with fully accessible and reportable screen based programs that used operators pay rates extracted from the payroll data. Pity I worked for a miser!
"the reason you don't go beyond 72 is because it ensures your program is responsive on mobile devices " LOL
I was so confused when I heard that hahahah
I lost it when he delivered this line so casually
I actually repeated that frame twice to check :D
Yeah 1956 had a big vision like that. Apple just stole it.
probably because it makes no sense whatsoever. having hardcoded line breaks is about the least responsive thing you can do.
I am 30 years old and COBOL was the first Programming language I learnt in my company. I was a COBOL Programmer for nearly 10 years. Leaving that company and learning real programming languages was like a caveman entering a city in the 20th century
That's crazy. Did you work for an investment bank? I'm guessing you got a job straight out of college. I used to work at Bear Sterns with a bunch of COBOL programmers.
Having worked in every mainframe language from ASSEMBLER to CSP, I can assure you that COBOL is almost the worst language ever written.
@@raydunn2582what are worst ones in your opinion?
NATURAL@@MavikBow
@@raydunn2582I'm starting to learn COBOL today and it's Grace Hoppers birthday 🦾🥳
The syntax error at the end of this tutorial is just golden
The dude tried to run the source code! What an idiot!
@@AndrewDeFaria at least, he put a lot of effort to make this video
😂😂😂 I love that ahahaha
@@AndrewDeFaria it's just humor. Learn to appreciate some fun and get some life dude
Executing the .cbl source file :-p
"It was developed over one hundred years ago in 1959"
I didn't even give that statement a second thought
stop you've violated the law!
heh
@@jangamecuber heh
@@Sean-ri5np heh back
You literally learnt COBOL to teach COBOL to people who would never learn COBOL. Productive!
Vrunda ONE well this vid and the news has got me considering it but first I've got to find evidence of remotework/consulting opportunities where I dictate terms and pay.
Looks like inception movie pattern bro 😅
He didn't, just look how he got a syntax error when compiling the code
@@katech6020 it was intended it's sarcasm ! It forecasts the life cycle of a cobol programmer
My OOP teacher once said to us in class i won't accept a cobol job even if they pay me $50K/month
I have been a COBOL dev for nearly 30 years and I will be in demand until I retire. That is job security.
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." - Edsger Dijkstra
Dijkstra was a proponent of Algol and those kinds of languages.
COBOL by definition was never intended to be a good computer science language. It was business oriented. Easy to write and maintain (for the times) by programmers coming from a business background.
I attended UT Austin in the 90s. Dr Dijkstra came as a guest and gave a lecture to one of the classes I was in, it was very cool to meet a legend!
@@theophilussparks5839 And later opposed Java and python. For good reason. Exactly what he said would happen happened.
@Butt Cube C doesn't cripple the mind. I don't see how you can say that. C++ is clearly the leading cause of involuntary commitment among programmers though.
The ending killed me seeing those errors and then hailing that you can get humongous salaries due to this. 2am happenings.
I'm still dead....😂
"Everything should work perfectly." lmao
Lol probably foreshadowing the real work cycle of a COBOL dev
he ran the source code lmao
I thought i was too stoned the first time...went back and replayed it to make sure..Ripped!!! :D :D
This programming language isn't just _for_ businesses, it _is_ a business. It has divisions and everything.
And a strict hierarchy (of variables)
@@mrmimeisfunny Very few priests.
0:08
Damn, I can't believe it's already 2059!
He is from the future 😆
Just making sure this video stays relevant in the future ;)
like cobol, this video is future proof
I think very few companies / governments will switch from Cobol to something by 2059
May be just rounding errors due to the millennium bug... This video is a toy
I made a living at it for forty years. The last place I worked is in their fifteenth year of a five-year plan to get off the mainframe. It's hard to justify spending tons of money to replace software with new software to do the exact same thing.
P.S. Columns 73-80 were intended for the program name on punched cards, 1 - 6 for sequence numbers, in case you dropped the deck. But after source code software came along, that wasn't needed.
P.P.S. COBOL was designed for basic business record-keeping done with batch processing (jobs that usually ran overnight). It was later adapted to handle online processing. Much of the business world still uses mainframes to do the work. Your bank probably has a modern looking front-end to display on your phone or browser, but it is still based on mainframe processes behind the scenes.
fifteenth year of a five-year plan... lmao i know that feel
Man you must be an human encyclopedia(in computers) then 😂
I was in Industrial Engineering in my 20s in 1981. I bought an Apple II with my tax refund - no disk drive or printer, not enough cash. I had previously put an incentive payroll system on a 4 bit processor equipped Monroe desktop machine with 4K of ram all in machine code. So learning the Apple was easy. I automated some of the office tasks that took tons of work just to see if I could, brought it in to the office to show them. A few people from the IT dept. came by and checked it out. A couple weeks later they offered me a job in IT coding Cobol. I told them I didn't know it, they said no problem we will train you. I watched 21 Deltak courses on video in 19 days with workbooks (with graded tests, you couldn't go to the next one if you didn't pass the test). Then I was given a small program to code and after a few fumbles it worked. They insisted on structured programming.
I became proficient in Cobol and received raises, in 3 years I doubled my salary from Industrial Engineering. Sadly, after 177 years of business the company folded and I had to change jobs. Learned to code online Cobol programs under CICS, wrote over 100 programs as part of an order/inventory/shipping system. PCs were still my first love and as they grew in number set up our first small network then later a company wide intranet with 150 attached PCs and was promoted to Network Administrator and set up systems to transfer data from the network to the mainframe and vice versa, later changing this to network to Unix system running Oracle. Retired from this position.
Cobol was never my favorite, but it provided shelter and food for my family and was usually relatively easy to debug if it crashed. Early on I was the "on call" person for night time batch jobs so I'd get a call at 3 am to fix a crash, usually for a program I didn't write. But the structured code helped enormously and it usually didn't take too long to get it fixed so I could return home.
One side story - when I was on night call, I got a call for a system that I wasn't responsible for and I questioned this. I was told that the person responsible was there but needed help and it was related to a system in my domain. So I went in, and the reason help was needed was because the other guy (who was near retirement age) had been in a bar with his wife until 2 am and was very drunk. He managed some non-IBM machines that interfaced to the mainframe and then the programs I was over processed the data. There had been a change in those machines and some bad (non numeric) data came in and crashed the Cobol program. I told him the field in question and he immediately knew how to fix it. So he goes to the keyboard linking to his machines and sits there a minute and then asks me if I can put his hands on the keyboard because he couldn't do it. I did so but was sure this wasn't going to work - if you can't find the keyboard how can you possibly change and compile a program? Sonavabitch - he did it! Clean compile first time, good data coming through. I offered to drive him home but he declined. I was really worried that he would wreck but he was at work the next day, vehicle intact.
how do modern backend languages like say java, c#, node, python etc interact with mainframe? Say I go to my bank website and the frontend makes an api call to their backend java microservice to fetch my account balance. But from there how does this java microservice call/fetch/execute mainframe/cobol code and get my account balance to be displayed on frontend?
@@blasttrash there are tools like cics or ims that are an interface for the backend to interact with the mainframe. Nowadays things like java and c run on the mainframes but for things like db2 programming cobol and interfaces are used. So in your example the frontend would send the request for your bank status to the backend which in turn use the interface with cics and / or ims to get your bank balance.
🚨 There are ZERO jokes in this video. Preorder my COBOL enterprise course today fireship.io/cobol
i'm waiting for a paid tutoriel Jeff
If it's so serius, I would like to see more videos about COBOL from you. BTW your videos are awesome.
My grandma was working with COBOL....
I thought it's a dead language
@@besjansejrani1880 Good idea, just started working on a COBOL for enterprise course
@@Fireship I would assume you've finished the first lesson in the course
Having been educated in my college's computer science department, I held my nose and took a course on COBOL from the business department. That decision lead to recruitment as an intern programmer writing IMS COBOL and three months later as a full-time programmer. A few years later, I learned MVS macro-assembler language, spending a few years as a technical support analyst, eventually spending a nearly 30-years as a system software developer. Oh yes, I took that intern job writing COBOL in the summer of 1977.
Finally, computer languages have their strengths and weaknesses and COBOL's strength is report formatting.
Got a job for you
Can you provide an example of how COBOL is good at report formatting?
1977
"Program is RESPONSIVE on mobile devices", absolutely gold man XD
They had mobile devices back then, it just meant it took up less space.
Yeah, back in the day they were called crack berries and the like. 🤷♀️ Um, blackberry...
I didn't understand this. ...could you please clear meaning of this?
jaikumar848 During the 1980's in the USA, business executives stayed in touch with each other with mobile devices known as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs for short). PDAs were marketed as a secretary in your pocket, so to speak.
In modern times, you would use a widget suite, or Google Calendar 🗓 on your cell phone, tablet, or personal computer.
COBOL would be an ideal language for coding on a mobile device itself (as opposed to say developing your apps in something like Android Studio on a PC). Since COBOL syntax is made up of English words, it would be much easier to code using gesture typing than other languages, which use a lot of punctuation symbols, which doesn't exactly play to the strengths of the mobile "keyboard."
The amazing thing about COBOL is that there are no libraries to learn. So once you know the language, you know *everything*. That means that you get to code your own XML/Json parsers from scratch. In COBOL! It's awesome!
Yes the sentence “advanced features” followed by *crickets* had me sold, I need to know more now
COBOL has libraries :/.
@@Kyrelel There weren't any in any of the shops I worked in that used COBOL (or PL/1).
You don't have to write your own parsers if you use "XML Thunder" for example. However, since cobol version 6 you have the "json parse" and "xml parse" keywords built into the language itself, making it even simpler.
Why was this released not on April Fools lmao
Because this video is 100% serious!
@@Fireship Even the part about the code being mobile responsive?!
@@leonf.7893 That is actually a good practice. Keeping statements small makes them more understandable. If not in written COBOL that is...
Because even today about 50% of the world business and many government agencies run on COBOL. All together several hundred million lines of code. And there are very very few people who knows how to maintain or even to read that code.
@@adam-k I wonder why it's so difficult to rewrite these systems. I would have thought our improved languages and IDEs would have made it much easier.
I wrote COBOL programs 35 years ago, some of them are probably still running. I take great pride in telling people that I write legacy software. There's nothing wrong with it, just a bit verbose.
What do COBOL programmers do nowadays? Are they fixing bugs? Shouldn't all bugs have been caught out and fixed by now, in a codebase as old as the one you left behind? Or are there adjustments required by eg. reinstalling such code onto new, replaced hardware?
@@vibovitold There are myriad business updates that require changes to the COBOL.
Why businesses don't move into modern age
@@xeon39688 Because that would requirier them to recreate everything that is currently done in COBOL in a different language which is stupidly expensive for very little gain from the companies point of view.
ever heard of something called "technical debt" ?@@xeon39688
I had to take a year of programming in COBOL in high school. I went from getting straight A's in BASIC the year before to failing my first quarter of COBOL. I buckled down and got an A for the rest of the year. But I hated it. It was the only programming language where you would have to type in three to four pages of code to create a half page report. You compile your code and have three errors. Fix those three errors and get 97 errors on the next compile. I now have been programming professionally for 35 years and fortunately have not had to write one line of Cobol.
I’m learning COBOL currently (before you ask why it’s because I’m passionate about legacy computers) and it’s not THAT bad so far. The most frustrating things so far is the archaic way Cobol reads data off files, and the fact that if you miss a single ‘.’ ANYWHERE the whole code has an absolute meltdown.
Also having to define every variable in a table/array manually, then defining the table/array using the DEFINES clause is a tremendous pain in the ass.
@@ZemanTheMighty syntax checks exist in all programming languages
@@ZemanTheMighty Completely agree, i was pretty good in COBOL back i the day 40 years back. My favorite language would be C or C# now. I think on of the the biggest issue many have then never really learned COBOL and use it as best as they can. For report HIGHLY recommend learning the RD (Report Description) if memory serves me. All to often i saw many fighting with generating reports, think 80-90% of all my programs is did were reports. Those not using the RD would spend days with print spacing charts, and running, printing, debugging over and over and over. With an RD pretty much sit down learn the layout and done.... Provided you know how to use and RD. And honestly even though c/c# are my favorites, still liked teh 66,77, or 88 level variables. I did COBOL as mentioned almost 40 years back now, one evening i was at a friend's house and watching him work on what was at the time MS-DOS, ya he worked at $icroMoft as is did later on, but watching him work on a PC was like WOW, that is a hell of a lot easier and started making the move from mainframes and some work i did on a CRAY for a while to a PC. The ease of working on a PC was so much better.... Just hope the tools for COBOL are better now. I remember a friend bought Micro Focus Cobol, not ever sure if they are still around. It seems it make COBOL a bit easy, and honestly didn't like how verbose it was... But overall other then "Why does the F&$king '.' need to be a line/statement terminator... Can't have a smaller character...? Guess one reason i like C as much as i did it used a semicolon and a lot bigger then a period...
As I remember, it took 2 pages of continuous feed paper, the kind all the printers used back then, to print "Hello, World".
@@charlesgantz5865 Ya sounds right, might argue possibly 3 pages of the good old large pages (11" x 17") if i'm remembering correctly. Back in the old days it wouldn't be uncommon the previous print job left the printer in an unknown state. So the three pages were a form feed to get the printer to a known state, while when i stated in the 80's most everyone would by common best practice would do a form feed. so the first page i was suggesting may often not be needed... Than a banner page as you normally worked in a batch environment and had to identify your print job, and was nice people would deliver the print out to your desk... And often the extra blank page them may not have been needed, the operation people would remove it before you ever say it... And the rest or only the one page that was your output however billions of pages it might be... 🤡
As someone once wrote: There are two types of fool. The first says “This is old and therefore good”, and the other says “This is new and therefore better”
@@vlc-cosplayer might as well add headphone-jack-phobia: "this is old therefore it's bad"
But then there is the fool that never evolves. That's the worst one.
I am surrounded by people who says “this is old and therefore crap” guess I’m in a genius club
Cobol : 600 reserve words
Me: Ait Imma head out.
X86 assembly has left the chat.
past me: i'll learn BASIC
also past me: ...and HTML, and Visual Basic and JAVA
present me: can't they just let all the swift and minecraft types loose on these problems?
@@jeremiahglover7562 tbh x86 assembly is way more readable
Cobol is so toxic language if you program in cobol you will always SHOUT TO PEOPLE
(İts funny maybe there is a video just teacher shouts the reserved words)
@@nadavln3797x86 assembler is BRAIN DEAD. Its MUCH easier in a mainframe.
Wtf is a stack pointer? No need for it. Why limit to 1 register for math?
Why is the addr bus 20 bit on a 16 bit machine?
Why give tour register so many names? (RAX. RAHN RAL) very stupid
Been writing mainframe assembly since 1968. X86 is a toy and very inefficient.
COBOL: I'm going to have verbose syntax.
Also COBOL: I'm going to only let you have 72 characters per line.
Ha ha. Has to fit on a punch card? That's one way to enforce the style guide.
Even when we moved from punch cards to terminals most terminals were 80 columns by 24 rows. Oh the good old days.
@@steves9250 I think when I was learning FORTRAN back in the day (1997, ha), we may have had column limits. I remember having to FTP my code up and then compile and link it and then run it on the old VAX terminals. Good times.
kkkkk
Hello everyone,
Actually I had a query...Can C be used on mainframe computer that are currently being actively used by majority of the buisnesses?
@@lboston4660 Hey, thanks for sparing time to reply to my comment. I'm referring to majority of the the computers currently being used...I have 0 knowledge about mainframes..Maybe if you could help me out..
I have been working with COBOL in some capacity for 22 years now. I know it gets shit on by the cool kids but like Jason Vorhees it just refuses to die!
Oh hey! Just got recommended this video and now I’m tempted to learn it.
todd herron this video makes you want to code in COBOL??? It makes me want to issue corrections. This guy apparently got his information from other than hands on practice. But it is fairly easy to learn. Even the simplest languages can build complex programs. Maybe not good ones, but definitely complex. One of the programs that I frequently had to maintain was over 13,000 lines of COBOL code.
You can cross compile it into Python.
COBOL was mocked just as much, if not more, even in the ‘70’s.
@@kolive81 wie 13 mein grösstes hatte über 100000 Code
Fireship: "And everything should work perfectly"
Cobol: I don't think so.
Hahahaha, I love these videos :3
love how the syntax error starts right with the very first token of the program (000100) 😂
@@Merthalophor it's not a syntax error, he tried to run the cobol source, not the binary, lol.
@@Merthalophor The same would happen, if you would run C++ code. The program wouldn't know where even to start
COBOL is just damn so simple. I wonder why there is shortage of COBOL programmers when I can be mastered in 100 sec.
Because we can learn 600 syntax just by learning in just 100 sec
Vaibhav Kumar because coding in COBOL is boring. I coded in COBOL for years and was frequently frustrated by the limitations of the language. However, since then COBOL has been improved upon several times. As other commenters stated, it can process XML and call java and C programs. Yes, mainframes (at least the ones running z/OS) can run POSIX compliant stuff and present a Unix prompt interface. It has probably improved in the 6 years since I retired. The big problem is grasping what the 10,000 plus lines of code are doing not the task of understanding the language. At one point, I installed a database client using X-Windows (the mainframe being the X server or client-i could never keep those straight) because the installer had been set up to run universally.
Because you are mostly working on legacy systems that were created maybe 30 or more years ago and most of the time it is just a mess of spaghetti code which is very frustating. Programms with nearly 20k lines of code which 1000 of edits through the years. Maintenance is a nightmare.
Cobol in batch isn't hard, but it's not simple. You have to understand how to make it interact with the OS. That requires JCL and Procs. If what you code in your program isnt supported in your JCL and the systems master catalog, your program will abend. If you've ever tried to figure out a SOC4, it can make you weep. Assuming the company you work for didn't cheap out, you may a tool that helps you solve abends. If not, you will have a lovely (read "impossible") time trying to figure out how to read a "dump"...assuming you can find anyone to help, you get to add and subtract in hexadecimal once you know and find the appropriate bits.
Cobol is simple. But many Cobol programs are very large and hard to understand, and were written before people knew how to write good code.
God that looks painful. I can see why that was useful back in the day though.
TBH it's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but very antiquated by modern standards.
i agree it's alright, i think it's too verbose. I would spend a part of my six digit salary and hire a typist and dictate cobol. the Hardest and useful thing to program is assembly imo.
It's not that hard actually, I've been working with cobol for the past 4 years, and it's pretty easy compared to other languages. It's not object oriented, so it's simple to implement, and works well. There are programs running without errors or intervention for decades... All the banks and financial companies in my country uses Cobol.
@@Set_Abominae Is the tooling around cobol pretty good? Cause that's the real game changer
@@Set_Abominae Wasn't there an object oriented version of COBOL II from IBM in the late 90's - I think I remember looking at it and thinking "why?". Each class was almost a standalone program.
I live in New Jersey, an hour after hearing my governor calling for COBOL programmers, I started to research and plan how to learn it. One morbidly verbose online tutorial and one day of figuring out how to run a virtual mainframe along with setting up its 3270 virtual terminal, I've gotten a decent "Hello World" out of it. :-)
How did that go?
It's brutally difficult to get entry level programming jobs these days even with a degree. I've been toying with the idea of COBOL but I'm also wondering if there's like a minimum experience requirement to break into "entry level" jobs.
@@jayspeidell I contacted the appropriate number that the governor mentioned; mind you, he literally said that the unemployment system was backed up so heavily they were desperate to find anyone who’d work with COBOL . . . I never heard back.
It was a long shot but worth the try.
That sounds terrible 🤣🤣
In my opinion Cobol is a very easy language, which you can master in 1 or 2 month, if you have programming knowledge. Very Special is the control-break algorithm and the sort algorithm in cobol.
@@jayspeidell These days, it seems like most places no longer accept "self taught" experience at all, nor unpaid internships. If you weren't getting _paid, by a company that was not yourself,_ to write on someone's computer, then you have "no experience".
if you learn COBOL you will definitely have a lot of job opportunities.
Everyone learns the new languages now, but there is a lot of demand for developers able to work on legacy systems. its so bad that some companies are begging retired programmers to come out of retirement to fix a problem for them.
So if you learn COBOL or any other legacy language, expect to work on number of old systems, doing very specific things that there is just no modern replacement to.
What kind of salaries could one demand doing this and how do those salaries compare to working with modern technologies as a software developer?
The issue is that even if you learn COBOL you’d be useless in most of these code bases. There are also different versions of COBOL like COBOL II and III. Some are different depending on the mainframe. And it’s not just COBOL you will also need to learn things like JCL and CICS. There is a whole stack and there isn’t a ton of info about it anymore.
Oh and you know there are COBOL code bases that are 50+ years old and billions of lines of code. So uh good luck
That's what's known as "readable code"
It's a very important and underappreciated paradigm guys
During labor, the pain is so great that a woman can almost imagine what men feel when they code in COBOL
What about the pain a woman feels when coding in COBOL whilst being in labor?
@@jayanths1221 almost as hard as being a php programmer in 2020
@@okie9025 Hey take that back, you're talking to a PHP programmer in 2020..
@@jayanths1221 get rid of that old php stuff, COBOL is the future!
I could feel that because I am using cobol for last 1 year!!!
You know the world is ending when a JS slinger is suggesting we start learning COBOL to stay employed...
They should instead hire someone to develop something slightly better.
Andrew Lankford yeah, they should hire someone to rewrite all that legacy to mindfuck, imagine how efficient they would become
@@willinton06 whats with mindfck anyway .
This video is great; I was debating between Rust and Go as my next language but I think these COBOL guys might really be on to something.
What do you think are the best features of Rust or Go or maybe DART?
😄 🤣 😂...unless this is some bad sarcasm, go with Go. You will be happier and program with the cool kids 😎.
Fed me for 20+ years. Thank you,Adm. Grace Murry Hopper.
I'm COBOL ex-developer and this video is so well-done! 🤘Many claps, you made my day!
Would you recommend going into it?
grill detected, opinion rejected
@@chiragsingla. your powerlevel is showing, go back to /g/
Slightly off topic but how would pronounce your name?
@@Ergydion I think she just hit her face on the keyboard when writing the last name
Former COBOL Coder here. COBOL is as interesting as an old yellow brick. BUT, it does it's job REALLY WELL. It handles records that are SOMEWHAT readable by humans. It crunches those basic math numbers and sorts the lists of customers with APLOMB.
That's all it does. It takes a record that could well have been on something like a 3x5 card...matches it with like records, extracts the data important to the users, and puts it somewhere they can use it.
You don't always need a racehorse or even an exotic unicorn. Sometimes, you JUST NEED A MULE.
I was forced to take 3 courses COBOL in college, after the third course I swear to myself to never touch COBOL of my life again!
COBOL, PL/1, Basic, FORTRAN, only the beginning!!!!
I wasn’t crazy about it either but when I entered the market in the 80’s, it was my best bet. I got away from coding in it after about 3 years and flipped to the side of installing software on the mainframe after 5 which meant I was then supporting the flood of questions from a too rapidly growing, primarily COBOL writing, department. Ah, fun times.
i feel the same about Prolog
I went to college in 1986-1988, it was assember, cobol, rpg II, pl1. Other secondary languages they taught us were fortran, pascal, and APL, which were on the way out (pascal was never really used in business, mostly used in universities). Used cobol extensively from 1988-1993 when we started converting to client/server. pc's couldn't do much back in the day, and a unix server was expensive and slow. mainframes and minis were still fast if you have 50-5000 people hammering in transacations.
@@jimchabai3163 I heard if you like math, modern APL is a nice hobby language to have now days. One thing is for sure: I wasn't built to mess around with APL.
I have been working on COBOL since 2011 when I got my first job out of college. It is my favorite language I have ever learned. This video obviously oversimplifies the language to fulfill some weird vendetta, but it is without a doubt still in very high demand.
i remember mid 80's in college printing out reems of paper on the big printer. some of those programs had a zillion lines of code but i loved cobol.
Is it feasible for modern professional software developers to learn COBOL development in say one year and be able to offer value or is it a language and programming environment that takes many years to get to a professional level? Asking for a friend.
That was actually very interesting haha. Also I laughed out loud with the responsive joke. Good one Jeff
At my first job, my supervisor was a guy somewhere in his 60's who had programmed many of our legacy COBOL programs himself in the nineties.
He was very confused as to why I found the language incredibly frustrating to work with, since "it's just english".
I like python because it's mostly just English.
I ran into the same problem, my COBOL mentor said they hated modern languages because they do too much stuff for you. Once you have read through massive amounts of COBOL though its design does start making sense weirdly
@@hopelessdecoy I think that's called Stockholm Syndrome
When you forget what it was like not to know how to do the thing you spent several decades learning how to do...
@@hopelessdecoy Your COBOL mentor must have loved assembler language programming.
That's how I started my career at a large bank 🏦
And honestly, the only thing you can't use it for Is web/mobile services. But rest assured that all the heavy number crunching and processes from request API are sent to the mainframe backend to get processed because it's still the core of many enterprises processes.
Actually, COBOL can be used for web services. I used CICS (transactional system) and COBOL for a proof of concept in the 90’s for adding a web interface to our mainframe COBOL programs.
@@kolive81 I guess, when he sais "can't use it for web/mobile services", he actually means that there is no publicly available, well-known library or framework for it
Depending on the compiler and the machine it's running on...
I wrote an error-correcting file transfer protocol (with automatic reconnect) on minicomputers in COBOL in 1977. Had to use auto redial because 1200 baud tended to drop.
Comfortably retired at age 54 after 30 years as a COBOL programmer. Haters gonna hate, but it was a fun ride.
PS I was one of the guys that saved the world from the Y2K bug. You're welcome.
What are the odds you burdened us with y2k in the first place?
@Jessy Guirado Be with you may the COBOL!
@@amandahugankiss4110 Zero. Absolutely zero. What's your point?
I took one semester of COBOL in college and I really enjoyed it. The funny thing was that even though I got a C in the class, I felt like I learned everything. That class really helped me to think logically and I was still using broad principles I learned in there 20 years later (to solve computer problems).
@@michaelinhouston9086 I think that's the best part of learning any procedural computer language. You have to figure out how to solve the problem before you can make the computer do it. One you know it's just syntax after that.
Working in a financial institution, I can confirm that COBOL is still widely used and maintained.
Are you serious or is that just a joke?
@@spacemeter3001 Dead serious. I even had the absolute pleasure of maintaining PL/1 applications in my old department (old IBM mainframe language). Being a CS student, it was not the most lucrative situation, so I switched to another department working with modern technologies instead.
this is true , most of the old banks are still running their systems on Cobol , they cant migrate because they are sensitive data relates to people money
Yes, I can attest this. Maybe of old legacy core system are literally running COBOL due to IBM’s supremacy back then. Why you think IBM still around eh?
And if you are a senior COBOL programmer, its easy to get insane amounts of money in salary. It became the "nobody will learn so we got pay the big bank to the one that still know"
Slight error. The punch card has 80 columns. Columns 73-80 were usually used to number your cards. Why? In case you dropped your desk or cards on the way to the punch card reader.
That's why you put a diagonal line on the side of your card stack with a marker.
Most of the United State's unemployment systems are still currently written in COBOL, so while it is an antiquated programming language, the few of those that do still know it can make an absolute crap load of money for their services.
Banks and insurance companies all over the world also still use COBOL. In my country though it's mostly been maintenance with little new code written, so it gets outsourced to cheaper countries.
Ceramic yeah, pretty much all the financial systems are built in COBOL. Weird to watch a video making fun of a language that fuels much of what we do.
Lol yeah I work at a company that sells COBOL compilers for mainframe and pc and hearing and seeing the guys who work on cobol so there jobs makes me appreciate why we get paid so much ( I work on similarly outdated tech that is business critical). They work with banks that kick off because they made dividing by zero throw an exception rather than do nothing as well as other customers using other weird undefined bits of behaviour.
@@OGAndrew94 It's just that many seem to think old = bad, which makes no sense considering many older languages like C are still widely used.
I'm not so sure about that. New Jersey is using COBOL in their unemployment processing but I heard they are looking for "volunteers." I've checked into that, there's rarely much money in "volunteering."
When I told my mother I was learning to code on my own last year, she told me about the courses of COBOL and the punching cards that existed back when she was young. She's 66 now. 😁
In college the big challenge was to find a keypunch machine that was not being used. At my college they were put in any vacant spot - my favorite was in a small room under a stairwell - those machines were almost always available.
COBOL is the simple part
Managing the JCL and other mainframe tasks to compile and put into production is where the mastery is. This is mission critical, high throughput stuff running on 70's PC design, working with 40 years of production libraries and hacks.
" you are qualified to earn your 6 figure salary" 1:42 :Error not found 😂
He's running the cbl source file as a script, instead of the binary program he compiled.
I took a programming class that used COBOL.
Once you figure out it's unusual syntax it's actually just modular programming.
You write the modules and a main module.
The main module then calls the modules you wrote.
The biggest problem with COBOL is that almost no one teaches it any more.
@@20cmusic Cry harder. 😂
@@20cmusic yeah, but who's going to hire someone that doesn't know a thing about cobol?
@@lesthodson2802 He is right though, production is a completely different beast
@@StellaEFZ Thing is, if you had to decide between a candidate that had absolutely zero experience in COBOL vs a candidate who has taken introductory classes into COBOL, therefore understanding the basics of the language, which would you pick?
@@atomfusion231 I'm not saying to ignore people who know or who doesn't know, I'd pick the one who has the most experience 100%, esp since COBOL is basically black magic
I just would like to thank you for providing such good and simple explanations about what things are, things that I have no time to fully read about but that I still want to know about. Thank you, I hope you will keep up the good work
Love the part where he says "...it ensures your program is responsive on mobile devices". 😂
Yeah... this dude is an ijit. Stopping in column 72 was because there was a sequence number in 73-80..especially important when your program lived on Hollerith 80 column cards.
The cobol language is a small fraction of what you need to know. A lot of database IO predates SQL so there is a lot to know there. You have to know how to compile and link your program. How to use job control language. Is your job running interactive or batch. How to display info on the screen and accept data entry. Calling another program, submitting a batch job.
Steve Richter
Yes. You really know Comun Bussines Oriented Language.
I became a Senior programmer because I learn it in 1978.
Many years later l was using it with Structured Query Language.
I worked with IBM 360-H-40 in the beggining.
Then I used WANG systems. But in the begining you had to be a system mainframes operator with knowlege of JCL. Job Control Language.
I also learned RPG l ll lll Report Program Generator.
Almost 20 years ago I was a Data Processing Manager
I also knew Formula Translator Program.
God bless you.
@@admirableemanuelaquila9763 I started programming maybe in 1982 on an IBM AS400. Back then it was called the S/38. Mostly RPG. It was easy enough to work with COBOL when we had to.
Steve Richter
Yes
Remember those computers.
Today I begin to listen videos about COBOL.
To Remember
My first Language is spanish and I was learnining english in 1977/1978.
And also COBOL. Ha ha. God bless u
Pro-Tip: You can use "redefines" to change an alpha to a numeric. Very useful for hashing or as a general array index.
I regret that you did not mention the role of the rear admiral Grace Hopper at the origin of COBOL
The divisions were used to clearly separate data from procedure, long before OO started talking about state and behavior.
Also, the identification division contains metadata (information about the program), a concept that appeared in modern computer languages much much later.
Thanks for recognizing Hopper here! She should have been mentioned in the vid
I met Adm Hopper briefly at the Washington Navy Yard; just passing in the passageway. No time to chat with me but it was awesome meeting a living legend in person.
The reason is also that they tried a Harvard code architecture with COBOL, so that the source of the data is completely irrelevant for the program that runs it. In that time necessary, as the data was stored on big replaceable tape drives or "hard drives" or even punch cards. Also the computers were slow so they needed to assure, that one process wouldn't change data another program was working with at that moment.
Nowadays this architecture becomes relevant again for PCs because of multicore multithread calculations - when you have seperate cores using the data the data should be inside the program secured from being changed while a process runs it
And here I thought that the DATA and PROCEDURE divisions were there to imitate Assembly with its "section .text" and "section .data". Who knew?
COBOL, JCL, CICS, DB2 will never die & will continue to bring me my pay check on .
Batch Intertest pays my bills
@@sagejpc1175 I use xpediter
In the *Dilbert* comic strip chat on Disqus, someone mentioned that 75% of projects to replace legacy systems fail. As a result, managers are reluctant to start projects that replace legacy systems. And that's why so many COBOL legacy systems are still around.
In a chat room, someone mentioned that although a CPU might have instructions that support decimal (BCD,) arithmetic, few modern languages directly use that support for fixed-point decimal numbers. Someone replied that's a reason some managers of departments who code accounting applications still like COBOL.
I once worked on a large Java project that had been converted from COBOL. Many of the Java programs felt like COBOL because they used a translator that replaced COBOL with references to Java classes. In my mind, it would have been just as well as to have kept some of it COBOL. The named fields in the COBOL file layout were more descriptive than record offsets
@@jamesfunk7614 It's kind of surprising for me that fixed-point decimal is not a built-in data type in most programming languages. Graydon Hoare wantet it for Rust, but it never happened.
I thought i had missed the april fools video when i saw this in the recommended.
You're so awesome man, the implicit jokes and the content is freaking good.
Whoa...
RESPONSIVE ON MOBILE DEVICES 🤣
Fireship🔥
This was super helpful, getting into typescript. The id div example was what I needed visually.
I'm a COBOL developer, really love the language, has a certain style to it tbh, but not much scope in advancing my career, would probably change domains soon.
This gave me flashbacks. Very painful flashbacks. I learned COBOL almost 50 years ago for my CS degree. Hated it.
I love educational straight to the point comic videos, keep them up please, I'm still postponing the 4hr python tutorial and that's my only real objective during the lockdown...
Developed over 100 years ago in 1959... So a math wizard and a COBOL expert all in one package. Amazing.
I learned COBOL in 1975. When I was 46 in I was made redundant from my job as director of operations on a newspaper. I got a job based on my COBOL experience. I think there have been changes so that you can use Object Orientation with COBOL as well as SQL (which wasn't available when I first learned).
Object COBOL?! I have to get that, just as soon as I get my jet-propelled horse & buggy.
Problems solving by computer programming is the most satisfying sensation I can get. If you're lucky (and repeat repeat repeat), sometimes it can even get close to art!
I've worked with a program that used max 80 character data blocks. The reason was the same: punch cards. They weren't used actively anymore, but compatibility had to be maintained.
The actual program had been upgraded over the years. The last time before me was in the 70s.
Fun times.
The amount of shade thrown here is extraordinary.
Get out of my head! I just thought about learning COBOL the other day after reading an article.
i think i need to go back to school... COBOL was developed over 100 years ago in 1959 and still used in 2020... Right off the bat i can tell this video is going to be golden...
how to reverse a linked list in cobol 🤯🤔
Easy. Send the list through the card punch, run it through the card reader backwards. You're welcome.
@@darwinhatheway6176 genius
@@darwinhatheway6176 lol
That's actually the function of one of the 600 reserved words. You haven't memorized them all yet? 🤔
You can implement any type of linked list in COBOL if you know something about DATA STRUCTURE.
Cobol is a great language for what it is used. I love to code in cobol.
Disclosure: I'm a retired mainframe sysprog. I have never done anything in COBOL, and would not do so by choice given my current interests. But...
COBOL is actually very good at doing the narrow range of things it was designed to do, and was particularly so in its time. It is in no way a general purpose language, and was never meant to be. If all I was doing was maintaining a ledger database by batch or online transactions, and producing reports, then I might put COBOL into contention for my language.
Also a retired sysprog. Never learned COBOL, I was always an assembler guy. You could do so much more, and write much more efficient code. If someone came to me for help with a COBOL bug, I would always ask them to provide the assembler output from the COBOL compiler so I could quickly diagnose using a memory dump! Dabbled a bit in FORTAN and PL/1, but never did much real coding with them. And btw, assembler gurus are also in demand, at bigger salaries than the COBOL folks!
I worked in an IBM shop where the the code was written in either COBOL on mainframe or RPG II (another archaism) on the midrange systems. Trouble is we also had a DEC VAX to run one very important system. IBM terminals used synchronous comms and the VAX used asynchronous comms to VT100 style terminals. Short story is that I wrote a 3000 line COBOL VT100 emulator to allow the VAX terminals to be output on synch. terminal network. It mostly worked!
"every program is structured with an easy-to-follow hierarchy" is the kind of thing someone might claim when they've never had to amend a COBOL program that is unstructured spaghetti code.
I love the self documenting features, even better than typescript
I KNEW IT! Mobile responsiveness! So glad COBOL is keeping up with the times.
🤣🤣🤣
i love that in the specific case of COBOL the program doesn't runs and jeff just refuses to elaborate further, just wrapping things up at that point as per his normal video flow ROFL
pure gold
Almost spat on my screen when you said the code had to be 72 characters "to be responsive on mobile!" Genius video 🤣🤣
Even the logic behind the 72 column limit was silly. If COBOL line numbers were on the left, why leave space on the right for more line numbers? when i was coding on the mainframe, 73-80 was typically for line numbers and the editor doesn’t display them. By the time punch cards were left behind, that 80 column limit was so ingrained that people couldn’t think about longer lines. In the old, old times, 73-80 were sequence numbers used for sorting the cards if they perchance got dropped. There was a machine that could sort the cards into the right order. Clearly, mechanical sort was superior to electronic sorting after the file was read in??? Beats me, it was before my time.
Love how the most played section is going back to review why it just errors out and throws syntax errors. The audio that overlays that is golden though. Awesome.
"... the reason we don't go beyond 72 columns is because your code needs to fit onto a physical punch card." I programmed a production program in COBOL, basically just once, in 1984. It's good to see that some things never change. However, it's not good to see that this thing has not changed.
Well, the more recent Cobol standards actually (optionally) support free form.
Someone needs to go check on Jeff. He’s not OK. Jeff, if you can read this, your family is very concerned…
I worked as a programmer for 30 years using COBOL and various assembler languages. After I retired, I took a degree in computing which meant learning more exciting languages such as C, C++ and Lisp. Later on, I got on to other declarative languages like Haskell and am now looking at APL which is as far from COBOL as you can get.
I remember reading a “If computer languages were vehicles” piece where APL was something like “a double decker bus that quickly takes rows and columns of data to their destination, but the instruments and controls are all labeled in Greek. Backwards.”.
Just curious, if you were to offer your services as a COBOL developer do you think you could make a lot more than what you would make as a Haskell or APL developer? I'm wondering if the myth about COBOL developers being in such high demand is true.
I learned and used COBOL starting in 1978. About 45 years ago. Used big iron IBM 360-40.
Columns 73 to 80 were for a sequence number if you dropped the card deck. The scrambled cards would be placed into a sorter, up to eight times to put them back in order! lol My eyes are tearing up from laughing at some of the things we did! This was a throw back to Assembler. BALR to all my peers.
1:32 my name is jeff
Haha, that made me lose it
The fire control system of the K9 Thunder, which comprises 70% of all recently deployed self propelleds, is written in Cobol.
Guys, the most amazing thing about this is that we get it.
If you're a fireship fan it's likely that you're working hard daily to get better and learn some level of code. And the fact that we get this means it's working! Show this to most your friends and they'll have no clue what they're looking at!
We're doing it guys!!!!
Learned this in the late 80s. It came as a shock going from a BASIC hobbyist
Thanks for 100 seconds of hysterical laughing! Really needed that XD
Great video ... I loved working in Cobol !
We used this during our undergrad days in my university back in 2016 as an exercise. Maaan, never going back to using COBOL. So hard 😂😅
One of my favorite quotes from the 70s by an ex colleague while assessing job prospects, “I know COBOL and I won’t starve”.
"tats wats known as readable code" :D :D :D rofl
Had to watch this because I knew it would be good. Was not disappointed. 😆
The problem with those jobs is not that you have to learn COBOL, it's that you need to read COBOL written by 100 different programmers.
Have you seen the C code that's out there?
You actually have to try to write indecipherable COBOL. Writing indecipherable C is easy, and it shows.
I'm not a programmer, and I'm not interested in programming, but I was born in the 60s and grew up with computers in the 70s and '80s and I actually knew what the acronym for COBOL stood for, so I clicked...
Once I got into the video, I realized what I hate about almost every other video on RUclips...
...most videos on RUclips have a 1 to 2 minute introduction where the RUclipsr tells you what he/she is going to tell you, then they feel that they have to have some intro credits to brand the video, then you get the old "please like and subscribe to the video and click the bell to get notified for new videos" section. Now that we're two or three minutes into the video, most videos actually start...
You are different and way better, because you get right to it.
Within the first 5 seconds of this video you tell me what COBOL is and what the acronym stands for (even though I didn't need it) and then you get right into the guts of the presentation. I love it!
Keep up the great work.
Mainframe with cobol:Pleace rewrite me in newer language and let me die I've been running for more time than you're zoomer workers were walking on this earth
Companies: Haha mainframe with cobol goes brrrrrrrr.
A large aerospace company used COBOL on their 'big iron' to design wiring harnesses in world-class airplanes. After the big iron was retired the millions of lines of COBOL code were migrated to Linux boxes (Windoze & relational db's were too slow) and its still working today.
Thanks for a good humored and informative video. But I gotta tell you that new versions of Cobol try to keep in touch with conputer language advances like object-oriented programming and event-driven programming for GUI.
I took two COBOL courses at the beginning of my tech career. I never had to use it in 38 years. Thank goodness.
I bet it is safe to say that there are more lines of COBOL in production today than any other programming language around.
How is that? Please explain. I think C and Assembler is a lot more used.
@@Studio1XN TO: aufsturz & Smug Anime Girl - all I can say is the sweet bliss of youth. You can google this one yourself, there are over 220 BILLION lines of Cobol in existence (production) today. My first programming language was Assembler (the best language ever written) but it didn't take many lines to create your programs (heck you didn't have the memory). I followed up with Cobol in the late 70s. I maintained programs that were 3000 PAGES long (not lines but PAGES). Ahh the joy of 'procedural' programming.
@@vlc-cosplayer TO: aufsturz & Smug Anime Girl - all I can say is the sweet bliss of youth. You can google this one yourself, there are over 220 BILLION lines of Cobol in existence (production) today. My first programming language was Assembler (the best language ever written) but it didn't take many lines to create your programs (heck you didn't have the memory). I followed up with Cobol in the late 70s. I maintained programs that were 3000 PAGES long (not lines but PAGES). Ahh the joy of 'procedural' programming.
I think it's safe to say more lines of Javascript or Python will be written _this month_ than there will be lines of COBOL for the duration of its existence.
@@dwill123 Assembly.... and Basic+ those were the days. 3000 pages of someone ELSES code makes you crazy I understand that. Cobol was not a fun progamming language for me at all in college.
These guys don't understand anything that adds numbers like wall street, most banks, the US and most of the states uses Cobol and most of the things that control like all utilities are still running on Unix or the very early Linux as ladder logic controllers.
Back around the 70's, I think, for the company for which I worked, I purchased some COBOL business software (purchasing, sales, payroll, etc) but managed to arrange access to the source code to enable me to write job costing software for the company -which made bespoke springs and pressings. I recall my first program compiled with hundreds of errors 'cos I forgot to put full stops at the end of program lines! And the verbosity of variables ! Later I think I solved the Y2K problem by adding 50 to the year portion of the date then testing whether it overflowed its two digits. I'm 83 now, but still recall the thrill of replacing that legacy system that used hand-written entries on Job cards with fully accessible and reportable screen based programs that used operators pay rates extracted from the payroll data. Pity I worked for a miser!