Using COBOL to make a video game!

[@enirya]

i'm glad you did this so i don't have to go through the effort of satisfying the morbid curiosity of "could i make a game with cobol?"

[@contextfree]

And I can imagine you doing that, too. Glad I helped out!

[@chuckbenedict7235]

I learned COBOL MANY years ago. First job out of college was maintaining COBOL business systems on IBM 3090. Later did work on using Microfocus (and an early version of the OO transpiler later added to MF COBOL) on Unix and PC platforms. You did an amazing job organizing and explaining this work, and it was really cool seeing COBOL integrated with SDL. So few really understand how much COBOL still exists in production environments.

[@jeanjcl]

Cobol is the business language of choice for business people to do business things.

[@0x1EGEN]

The most bureaucratic programming language.

[@RikusLategan]

Unlikely to ever be any of my business

[@guckstift1081]

When looking at this code I instantly get the smell of old paper in my nose from ancient programming handbooks that I borrowed a thousand years ago from my local library and never returned.

[@stevenhe3462]

9:13 "[B]ecause I really wasn't always sure exactly what was going on in my COBAL code." That pretty much sums up the COBAL experience, I guess.

[@ayoubbelatrous9914]

this feels more like Homework: The programming language.

[@BrainySmurf77]

Regarding the direct call to SDL in C: I just encountered this in C/C++ libraries recently - basically, if your executable does not directly access symbols from within a dynamic library, that library will never be loaded because the linker sees no reason to have the executable do so. For the GNU linker, the solution for me was to add the linker flag --no-as-needed (if using GCC, add "-Wl,--no-as-needed"). It looks like GNU COBOL may use the GNU linker, so, it may just work for you!

[@Bobbias]

Seeing the transpiled C source generated from COBOL was pretty cool.

[@xelaxander]

For once the compiled code might actually more readable than the original source.

[@Bobbias]

@@xelaxander I'm gonna have to disagree there. Once you get used to some of the quirks of COBOL it's actually really easy to read and understand.

[@dumbidiot1119]

@@Bobbiasfound the cobol user

[@contextfree]

I'm super glad some actual COBOL programmers have commented on this video. It's great to hear from them.

[@contextfree]

@Bobbias Thanks for commenting!

[@thfsilvab]

I haven't even started to watch and I already feel the pain

[@tuxino]

One thing I remember from working in COBOL (about 10 years ago) was that we *always* used a copybook to define the linkage section for a program, and then included (with the copy command) it into both the program itself and into any programs that would call it. We also had naming conventions for the source files, so that it was immediately obvious (without looking inside a file) which files belong together. (Kinda like an equivalent to .c and .h files in C.) Another thing we did, was have template programs with all the relevant divisions and sections largely prefilled, so whenever we needed to make a new program, we ran a utility that asked for the name of the new program, and which template we wanted to base it on, and possibly some extra template-specific questions (such as tables and fields for database lookups). It would then autogenerate the source file, and any relevant copybooks. For some simple sub-programs, such as a batch routine to dump a database table, or a sub-program to fetch a single record, we didn't need to do any more. The template system did all the work - including writing SQL.

[@TankorSmash]

I liked how you kept track of all the little tiny issues you ran into, really felt like I got a sense of what it was like making this

[@obinator9065]

Don’t know if this or getting my testicles twisted is worse.

[@OpenKeith]

9:41 YO FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE WHO PRONOUNCES PNG CORRECTLY

[@owenwexler7214]

Every time there is an emergency, COBOL devs are needed. Let's get this emergency apocalypse COBOL crisis bread, gentlemen.

[@Saviliana]

I wonder if we should get hollywood to film a movie about this plot, it could be interesting than whatever the current garbage they thrown out to the market every another week.

[@christopherfore7786]

This is really cool! Didn't know COBOL could do stuff like this.

[@contextfree]

Yeah, until I started trying things out, I had almost no idea what cobol could do at all.

[@lukez8352]

Looks like we're one step closer to a video on REXX. I would be interested in your thoughts on the string parsing & manipulation in that. I used to build edit macros in REXX to help quickly build out COBOL and JCL in my mainframe days, and it was wonderful.

[@noelkelly4354]

Don't forget CICS and DB2!

@@noelkelly4354 CICS is not a language and neither is DB2 As system automation sysprog for Z systems I do kind of work with it all, except cobol, I don't touch that stuff but rexx I see daily and write somewhat often (usually very simple chunks of "if ... then ...." into existing procedures, but sometimes pretty complex things) we were wondering with coworkers if we could write some games on Z, but no one will let us do it in production system and even if they would, they wouldn't allow us to tell anyone... but maybe some day on some sandbox

[@noelkelly4354]

@ I mention them because they're both resources that can be accessed from COBOL. Need persistence, Star Trek (1971 game) MMO terminals. ;)

[@edgeeffect]

I used to genuinely love CoBOL back in the olden days. Way nicer to look at than BASIC or ForTran. :) PDP-11/73, a VT-100, RSTS/E, and COBOL-81 .... (sigh) ... those were the days. `goback` sounds like a weird GNU-ism .... `STOP RUN.` is the normal way of going about it.

[@contextfree]

Seems you've got some experience on me. My time starts with TV-connected computers running BASIC in the 80s.

[@edgeeffect]

@@contextfree just a little bit before... TV connected school computers running BASIC

[@nathanfranck5822]

The special two digit codes for lines sounds kinda vile, but it does seem mostly useable with enough familiarization

[@kim15742]

COBOL is so verbose but when it comes to data types instead of being clear like any other language with integer, character, etc. it's the super unintuitive 9, x, z...

[@hackvlix]

You have to understand that when they designed the language, they had the vision that it the code should be understandable for people who possibly had no idea what integers or bytes were. Clearly a flawed vision, with hindsight. And imho even for that goal a flawed execution, for whoever is supposed to make sense of something like PIC X(10) ? 🤔

[@kim15742]

@@hackvlix Sure but they could have named it numeric, alphanumeric, alpha, etc. to be more verbose

[@hackvlix]

@@kim15742 Yeah, hard to tell what they were thinking there.

[@hackvlix]

@@edgeeffect Oh I do love me a good "IS" 😉 When/where did you use to write COBOL code, if I may ask?

[@edgeeffect]

@@hackvlix Only at college, never in industry (although I did once have a hobby project where I was reading old NASA data in fixed record length files - and I wished I had CoBOL then but I only had Clipper and Borland Turbo C++) We had a project where we were given a spec for a system in a textbook and had to do one of each of validate, sort, update and report programs using C81 on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E.

[@theseatoad]

Oh, this is awesome.

[@itsbk6192]

Absolutely devious behaviour being displayed here

[@cbbcbb6803]

Enjoyed.

[@lightrh]

i like dashes in variable names instead of underscores. feels easier to read.

[@mattmurphy7030]

Oh god

[@noelkelly4354]

You're a sick sick puppy! ;)

[@pablozuta2402]

This is pretty dope ngl

[@kristoff-it]

Awesome video!

[@letMeSayThatInIrish]

looks so wrong when divisions and sections are in lowercase

[@contextfree]

I just can't take extensive shout case, so I purposely avoided it. I probably should have commented on that in the video, though.

looks so wrong in VScode, I mean I use it sometimes for rexx, but usually it's all ISPF, much more visually pleasing

[@FireDragon91245]

ok, you awnsered my question "how is cobol", and now im never touching it

[@jfftck]

Why?

[@kim-lg7rc]

Next step is Haskell

[@erikschiegg68]

Had to chew that in my mainframe training. You better get a novel writer than a Cobol programmer, dude 😅

[@s1l3nttt]

Why tho

[@theowaldburg]

Who will join me on my COBOL startup venture?

[@flyingsquirrel3271]

It's gonna be hard to find someone with the necessary amount of self-hatred :-P

[@jimschneider799]

As GLaDOS once said, "the answer is no one. No one but you would be so pointlessly cruel."

[@Paulo-c3n]

So, GNUcobol is like a cracked version of python?

[@contextfree]

Not really. COBOL is lower level then Python, which is why compiling through C makes sense. But the details are quite different than C sometimes.

[@R1ONA]

lol this was hardcore

[@WadeMealing-n3b]

Was that my wasm cobwebber ?

[@contextfree]

No, sorry, though I think I ran across your project. Just put a star in it. I was trying to reference this pong game for building to wasm. I updated their dockerfile to latest dependencies and got that working, but I failed to get my own game working. moxon6.github.io/cobol-js-emscripten/

[@airman122469]

But… why though?

[@contextfree]

So people can ask why. :)

[@Requiem100500]

COBOL, except it's actually yet another C code generator

[@NuclearFury8]

If you like hyphens in variable names and no spaces in your functions, why not lisp? Just rebind parenthesis to not need shift, your pinky will thank you.

[@contextfree]

Yeah, I should have mentioned the similarity with lisp. I was just being quick there. I'm actually not a huge fan of even looking at nested parens, though I hear it grows on people.

[@contextfree]

And I know that Clojure at least has commas as optional whitespace, too. But I'm not sure which language in the past might have had that first.

[@NuclearFury8]

@@contextfree Didn't know that about Clojure. It reminds me of Racket (or all schemes?) treating braces and brackets as parens, letting you use them as disambiguators. I do agree about parens, they easily get confusing, and the only way I can follow nesting on a larger scale is indentation.

[@illegalsmirf]

python game_gen .... you been cheating a little bit there?

[@contextfree]

Good question! That's what generates the hex data from the PNG files.

[@lazyh0rse]

I don't know why people always assume that cobol developers have a higher pay. Upon looking at the salary of the jobs. It has relatively higher salary but not so much. You would be better off improving your existing skills in the job itself rather than going off track to a language nobody cares about.

[@mattmurphy7030]

"nobody cares about" _banks have entered the chat_

[@GCKteamKrispy]

That's nothing. I bet you can't make it in binary

[@v-2schneider264]

You definitely should get medical treatment as soon as possible.

[@SEOTADEO]

wtf hahaha

[@lifegrain6375]

Oi/hi, like No 500,

[@obiwanjacobi]

Cobol is not a language, it's a speech impediment... 😀