Not without tighter moderation. Most people won't put up with Troll Personality Disorder. All it takes is one to spoil the fun.
Modern software behaves as if it has ADHD. I'm beginning to think it is
programmed by mentally ill people, who give their software the
characteristic of someone like them.
Re: Cobol/gnucobol
By: Digital Man to Jcurtis on Wed May 28 2025 21:49:37
Nowadays, programmers are often called "software engineers". Anything is better than "coders". :-P
There's a great comedy song by Jonathan Coulton called "Code Monkey", bemoaning the life of a "coder". You can find it on YouTube.
Most of my friends are coders. All of them have the mentality that they are in it for the money. They end their shift and they don't code a single line more until the very next day. While at work, the goal is to fulfill assigned tasks within the deadline so the boss is happy - if they have to throw a horde of libraries at a problem then that is acceptable unless the project manager complains.
Re: Re: Cobol/gnucobol
By: Jcurtis to nelgin on Fri May 30 2025 08:11 am
Not without tighter moderation. Most people won't put up with Troll Personality Disorder. All it takes is one to spoil the fun.
I would take six hundred MROs than a single RPGnet moderator.
The reason is simple. Trolls you can deal with. A single asshole moderator means the platform becomes worthless.
In fact I would argue that the strength of alternative nets is that it is
I would argue that the strength of alternative nets is that it is not
held hostage by a single moderator or operator.
I would argue that the strength of alternative nets is that it is not
held hostage by a single moderator or operator.
Their users are a tiny minority. Don't look strong to me.
I coded on iSeries professionally.
That's amazing! Many years ago, second half of 90s, I was at the
AS/400 support center. Unfortunately I probably wasn't savvy enough
to learn COBOL on AS/400. it felt so difficult back then.
I think I have a book on COBOL on AS/400 in the garage that I have to
get back to life. I was much enjoying networking.
Just to set the expectations, I'm writing a simple app to catalog some collectables. It has a single indexed file at the moment.
It wasn't what I meant, but you actually answered me in the example
you provided.
What I meant was something like:
"(A)dd, (E)dit, (D)elete, (E)xit => _"
In your example code was stored in the variable PROCESS-INDICATOR
It was! But there's so much to learn.
At the end, I just want to have a bit of fun.
Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like that with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping it all in spreadsheets with gnumeric was sufficient enough. ;)
One thing that some people have difficulty with when going from
another language to COBOL is that, although the code reads like English, they are not used to needing to define all of their variables in working storage. For some reason, that just seemed logical to me.
Once upon a time, I considered writing a program to do something like tha
with my model railroad equipment. I eventually figured out that keeping i
all in spreadsheets with gnumeric was sufficient enough. ;)
Well, to be honest, part of the plan was to make a comparison like
"the cobol/mainframe way" and "the unix way", i.e. using standard shell
tools to manipulate CSV. I found out sc-im as a terminal based spreadsheet.
Ages ago, in 1999, my mentor invented the noSQL term (you can search him on wikipedia).
It was based on shell only, using sed awk and other standard
tools. I wrote an extended article about it on Linux Journal. Although
I can't recall much, I have a grasp on how powerful shell could be.
Plus, I recently joined the FreeBSD bandwagon. I truly admire how some FreeBSD have mastery on shell. If you look at the CBSD management tool
source code, feels like reading C++ instead of shell. Kudos to them.
I know, a csv/ods/xls can be as powerful today, aka "the poor man's database", but it was an excuse to learn COBOL.
Also, I am a model railway lover, although I lack the space and time
so I just had a few models of the (real) trains I used to play with
when I was a kid. My father used to work for the local railway company,
so I was not an estranger to it.
One thing that some people have difficulty with when going from
another language to COBOL is that, although the code reads like English, they are not used to needing to define all of their variables in working storage. For some reason, that just seemed logical to me.
I don't feel that as a huge issue for me. Many languages need to define
the variables at the beginning. It's just in a separate section.
I'm much more dealing now with the limits of the programming language,
as many things aren't built-in. Ex. generating a random string is not
as straightforward as I'm used to. But I get it, it was a language
that was born in the 60s, a lot of stuff just wasn't there.
Dumas Walker wrote to DARKNETGIRL <=-
I have tried BSD out a couple of times, usually just to test/play with
on a second-hand machine, but have always stuck with linux. I would
say that, too me, it seemed too similar in some ways to motivate me to change.
good to put thought into the overall design, or else you could end up w code that's hard to maintain.
Most software design is trash. That's why normal people don't like computers. ---
Most software design is trash. That's why normal people don't like computers.
Good point! I think you're right about that.
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