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First day of intro to programming at my university and the professor was introducing himself and his background and how his first job was writing cobol at a Paper Mill. He said COBOL was a revelation at the time and that we would never need to learn or use it.

Enter stage left my first job as a developer in 2016 and I'm tasked with learning cobol to support customizations to their 25 year old Lawson Implementation.

I'll probably never use it again but reading and writing cobol code opened my eyes to different design patterns not often seen in more modern languages. Seeing clever implementations of features that come out of the box in modern languages was really neat.



That sounds super interesting. Can you describe some of the interesting design patterns/clever implementations you saw? I feel like there is a lot of benefit in looking at weird languages as it opens your mind to new ways of solving problems.




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