TL;DR: it’s probably not that hard to pick up compared to the complex and deep stacks we use today. Someone will give it a shot.
COBOL is in a special place in our computing legacy. It’s too new to require intimate knowledge of the electronics that drive it (older systems and machine-code did), and is too old to be all that complicated (target machines were much smaller and slower). I would wager it’s actually not that hard to learn, and is probably a dream to code with modern equipment. You won’t be slowed down by punchcards, tape drives, time sharing, etc., and can probably use VSCode and an emulator to cover a ton of ground. The computing model is likely a straight line (storage -> compute -> storage), with little to no UI. In other words: simple by today’s standards.
TL;DR: it’s probably not that hard to pick up compared to the complex and deep stacks we use today. Someone will give it a shot.
COBOL is in a special place in our computing legacy. It’s too new to require intimate knowledge of the electronics that drive it (older systems and machine-code did), and is too old to be all that complicated (target machines were much smaller and slower). I would wager it’s actually not that hard to learn, and is probably a dream to code with modern equipment. You won’t be slowed down by punchcards, tape drives, time sharing, etc., and can probably use VSCode and an emulator to cover a ton of ground. The computing model is likely a straight line (storage -> compute -> storage), with little to no UI. In other words: simple by today’s standards.
The last update in the standard is from 2023 and includes OOP.
Thanks so much for this reply!
If you are new it’s probably easy. If you have some experience the roughness of it will drive you mad.