I can't recall if it was COBOL or FORTRAN, but I tried learning one of them after being pretty confident in picking up any other programming language I've tried to learn, including assembly (wouldn't want to use that for large projects but I've written context switches and such), but I ended up giving up because it felt like the learning materials themselves were in some other language.

Which sucked because I'm the kind of guy that thinks a task like refactoring millions of lines of legacy code into a more modern language would be fun (or satisfying at least). Phase 1 would be a 1:1 conversion (probably involving implementing various old language features in the new language or assembly to do it piece by piece), followed by phase 2 which would be a full redesign and rewrite, using the knowledge from phase 1 to ensue full feature parity. Because "we rewrote software but the new version doesn't do x, y, z that the old one did" sucks. Glances at Blizzard.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 days ago

FORTRAN is godawful, I can only image what COBOL is like. They're my counter to the people think languages essentially don't matter. No guys, there has been progress over the eras.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Opencobol or gnucobol is good. You vmcam install it on any Debian based system no issues.