Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?
I did an internship in 2009-2010 with a company who used MicroFocus “AcuCOBOL” to modernize a green-screen automotive dealership management system into a Windows GUI.<p>I wouldn’t say I did it for fun, but I did do it for the learning experience. My university was very invested in COBOL, and I had classmates who got offers much larger than mine to work for various finance companies in Wisconsin,  so I had already learned the basics of language.<p>It’s hard for me to separate the COBOL from all of the other dysfunctional things going on at the company. I knew that the language was a dead-end and did not want to get stuck with it. Not because I didn’t like the language, but because I was 21 and “Web 2.0” was in full swing and I knew I wanted to do something “cool”.<p>Migrating data files to new descriptors was always a stressful time. The equivalent of a database schema change, but you had to load the old files and rewrite in the new format largely manually.<p>The tooling we used felt dated, but worked well enough. Better than the tools we used in school.<p>I always used “Murach’s Structured COBOL” [1] as my primary reference. Carried that book just about everywhere during that time.<p>[1]: Murach&#x27;s Structured COBOL <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;hONfFT7" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;d&#x2F;hONfFT7</a>