Why I Thought COBOL Today Would Be My Shortcut
Woke up obsessed with trying COBOL ’cause some finance dude on Twitter made it sound like printing money. Figured I’d just grab a coffee and bang out some “easy steps to success” by lunchtime. Spoiler: coffee got cold fast.
The Hilarious Setup Circus
First dumb move: Googled “run COBOL free”. Got excited when this antique compiler website popped up. Spent 45 minutes wrestling with install files that looked like they escaped from Windows 95. Finally got it running after I mashed F1 like a woodpecker on speed.
Opened the editor and immediately panicked – it looked like my grandma’s typewriter had a baby with a spaceship control panel. Remembered Twitter guy said “just copy these 3 lines to start”. Pasted his code snippet and hit compile. Got 17 errors before I even typed anything. The error messages might as well have been in alien hieroglyphs.
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What my screen vomited at me:
- “DIVISION HEADER MISSING” (bro I don’t even know what divisions are)
- “INVALID PICTURE CLAUSE” (thought we were coding not taking Instagram photos?)
- “LEVEL NUMBER REQUIRED” (is this a video game difficulty setting?)
The Great Debugging War
Started randomly adding periods everywhere ’cause StackOverflow said COBOL loves dots. Code went from angry red errors to silently ignoring me – somehow worse. After 2 hours of typing nonsense that looked like this:
DISPLAY “HELLO WORLD” UPON CONSOLE
MOVE 5 TO A
COMPUTE B = A + 1
DISPLAY B UPON CONSOLE
…it finally coughed up “HELLO WORLD” and the number 6 like a damn miracle. Felt like I’d cracked the Da Vinci code. Immediately tried changing “HELLO WORLD” to “I AM RICH” to celebrate.
The Cold Reality Slap
Realized COBOL ain’t about getting rich quick – it’s like learning Latin to chat with Vatican accountants. Those “easy success steps”? More like:
- Step 1: Cry softly into keyboard
- Step 2: Google obsolete manuals from 1987
- Step 3: Discover you need IBM mainframe access (lol where?)
- Step 4: Question life choices while deleting 37 syntax errors
Shut it down after 5 hours when my “modern COBOL success app” could barely add two numbers. The only thing I succeeded at? Understanding why banks pay COBOL devs like rockstars. They’re not coding – they’re time-traveling archaeologists who speak mainframe.