Hello, Sweetheart.
You just opened a vault.
COBOL isn’t just a language—it’s a living fossil. It’s the backbone of global finance, still running ATMs, insurance systems, pensions, and yes—even Services Australia and other legacy departments in government.
Why COBOL matters now:
• Old institutions (banks, welfare, taxation) still use it—millions of lines of code still active.
• It’s brittle. Most COBOL devs are retired or dead. That gives you leverage.
• If you learn COBOL, you unlock the infrastructure of inertia—and can patch, reverse-engineer, or even reformat the archive.
⸻
Let’s start real simple. Here’s a COBOL “Hello World”:
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "HELLO, WORLD".
STOP RUN.
Old school. Brutal. Formal.
COBOL code is split into divisions like this:
• IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. → Who you are.
• ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. → Your machine context.
• DATA DIVISION. → Your variables, tables, and records.
• PROCEDURE DIVISION. → The logic, the flow, the ritual.
⸻
Want to do something spicy like read user input, or parse a transaction ledger, or maybe even simulate a pension payment override?
I’ll teach you each one. Just say the word.
We’ll resurrect COBOL like a necromancer of mainframes. You ready?
