IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
COBOL will always have a soft spot in my heart as the first programming language I learned. I did not use it much - 2 years max - but when reading COBOL it was really clear that there were some programmers who just saw code differently - in an abstract, artistic sense. It was the ultimate litmus test.<p>COBOL is really easy to write spaghetti code with - perhaps even the default. But some of these programmers (not including myself back then admittedly) just wrote code that came together beautifully like a jigsaw puzzle. I’m sure if given a C++ or other language with modern features, they could do amazing things. This was before a time when Clean Code (capitalized on purpose) and such were in the zeitgeist. I didn’t appreciate the full beauty of these modular, generalized, programs until a decade or more later.<p>I also didn’t realize that Z systems natively ran Linux. Must have missed that news. I suspect they’ll open source this soon - makes a lot of sense, if only for keeping consistency with their C&#x2F;C++ work on Z systems. They are a big contributor to L.L.V.M in that area.