esa

It comes off as simulating enums with strings.

And yeah, even the string interpolation seems kind of excessive when it’s just appending _address. Js is even kinda infamous for how willing it is to do that with +.

Yeah, translating between cases isn’t exactly a problem IME. Might be neat to have a case-aware grep though, so you can get kebab-case, snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase all done in one go.

Yeah, I’m reminded of how Germanic languages used to have singular, dual and plural. If we’d still had dual, we’d probably also be talking about not abstracting until we actually have a plural.

And even with a “please keep your feet on the floor” sign right next to them.

I mean, the fact that more than half-century-old COBOL continues to be maintained does speak to the fact that it is maintainable. That might also be part of what makes COBOL painful to the average developer: You’re not only dealing with a language that first appeared in 1959, designed for machines that were very different than modern computers; you’re also dealing with over a half century of legacy code, including all that means for Hyrum’s law.

Unfortunately maintainable and pleasant to work with are rather distinct concepts.

Eevee’s heteroglot entry for COBOL is interesting, coming from … practically anything else.

There’s also someone doing AOC in ABAP (basically SAP COBOL) who posts over in the AOC subreddit. I’ve looked at them and … mhm, I know some of these words!