---
title: A punch card ate my program!
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2018/program/proposals/453
beginning: '2018-11-09T10:45:00.000-08:00'
end: '2018-11-09T11:35:00.000-08:00'
presenters:
- name: Walter Mankowski
  affiliation: Syapse
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/750
  gravatar_id: 7bc366f53a55c1cf293b758ecf8e0666
  biography: |-
    Walt Mankowski is a senior software engineer at Syapse, where he helps healthcare providers bring precision medicine to cancer
    patients. Walt's a recovering ivory tower computer scientist who enjoys pointing out things that Perl does better than Python to his
    coworkers. In his past life he spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer at a major cable home shopping network. He enjoys Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and Futurama.
---

COBOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages — it doesn't get any respect. COBOL is routinely denigrated for its verbosity and dismissed as archaic, and for good reason: COBOL bears little to no resemblance to modern programming languages. Yet COBOL is far from a dead language. It processes an estimated 85% of all business
transactions, and 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are written every year!

In the past I’ve argued that COBOL isn’t such a bad language, but I'm not going to do that here! Instead, we’ll journey deep into the past to recreate a retro bug that could only happen in COBOL! Our travels will include:

* Syntactic white space!
* Scotch tape!
* Dueling compiler options!
* Virtual punch cards!
* Sentences!
* Code blocks!
* Periods!

No punch cards were harmed in the creation of this talk.
