The New COBOL
summary
COBOL remains a living spec (2018 spec) running billions of lines on mainframes, with real features like screen sections for record‑oriented forms and limits (nine‑digit accounts, amounts under ~$10,000 in the example) that reflect old hardware. Historical fixes (notably Y2K fixes in 1998–99) and tooling like F2PY glue to reuse Fortran/BLAS/LAPACK show legacy interop. The central claim is maintenance debt: critical code and dependencies rot unless organizations fund maintainers.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Start
- 0:59Languages that suck
- 1:28What is the new COBOL?
- 6:14FORTRAN
- 7:07BLAS & LAPACK
- 8:23Lisp
- 8:46FLOW-MATIC
- 10:06CODASYL
- 12:22Computers
- 13:04Record-Oriented Data
- 13:25Batch Processing
- 19:39ALGOL - Computer Science
- 21:04Python 3?
- 23:34event-stream
- 25:00Externalities
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