if I looked at it as a general-purpose language like C++/C#/Java, then, yes, it sucks really hard.
Plenty of people get by swinging a hammer all day and not a Swiss army knife. COBOL is one person's hammer. For me, at one point, it was RPG. You think COBOL is "domain specific"? RPG has the DSL right in the name: "Report Program Generator". Yuppers, RPG is a report writer. And when you're writing banking software or the like, which is just inputs munged into outputs, RPG did the job. Why use a language with shitty, dangerous string handling, no syntactic sugar for the task at hand, whose output keyword consists of "printf", dragging along a runtime with crap I'll never use, and other "general purpose" language problems when you can use a language crafted specifically for what you're trying to do?
I made plenty of money back in the day writing FoxPro. FoxPro sucks for embedded systems and writing an operating system. But ya know what it doesn't suck at? Taking some data, transforming it, do a little munging, and print some output. Which was precisely what customers were paying me to do at the time, and not writing a Windows competitor.
In my first job after my training, I had a boss who had practically written a couple of bespoke line-of-business applications for customers using FoxPro.
Three years ago I had to do some maintenance on an old-ish C++ application (also a one-of-a-kind-thing) that used a dBase backend for storage. I was lucky, though, the code was very well-written and, let's say, humble - it avoided unneccessary complexities whenever possible, and even without comments or any other documentation, I was able to figure out how it worked (at least the part that I was supposed to modify).
Part of the fun was getting a development environment to work with an ancient version of Visual Studio, but the second fun part was accessing that dBase database. I tried a couple of programs, none of them overly helpful, until I realized that ____ing Excel could open them. I don't know how well Excel supports interacting with these, but it worked well enough for inspection. ;-)
Excel should have worked just fine. The DBF format is not hard to understand, and it was documented in the manual that came with (IIRC) both dBase and FoxPro (I can still picture the page in my head from the FoxBase+ manual). Just a header with a record count and some field definitions, then the data. I haven't tried, but I bet with the docs in front of me I could write a parser in any number of languages in about 30 minutes, 30 minutes more to write to the DBF without corrupting it. You're on your own for indices, I never had to crack that nut. :-)
That is what that programmer told me, isn't it? COBOL was designed for a specific purpose, and according to her, having used it for that exact purpose, it gets the job done. COBOL seems to be the language hackers love to hate, but there is a reason it is still around.
During my training I once had a supervisor who spent years writing reports in RPG on an AS/400. She had interesting stories to tell, but unfortunately, she was always far too busy to actually tell them. :-(
Plenty of people get by swinging a hammer all day and not a Swiss army knife. COBOL is one person's hammer. For me, at one point, it was RPG. You think COBOL is "domain specific"? RPG has the DSL right in the name: "Report Program Generator". Yuppers, RPG is a report writer. And when you're writing banking software or the like, which is just inputs munged into outputs, RPG did the job. Why use a language with shitty, dangerous string handling, no syntactic sugar for the task at hand, whose output keyword consists of "printf", dragging along a runtime with crap I'll never use, and other "general purpose" language problems when you can use a language crafted specifically for what you're trying to do?
I made plenty of money back in the day writing FoxPro. FoxPro sucks for embedded systems and writing an operating system. But ya know what it doesn't suck at? Taking some data, transforming it, do a little munging, and print some output. Which was precisely what customers were paying me to do at the time, and not writing a Windows competitor.