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COBOL: A 1959 Idea and 2022 Technology

COBOL, the unassuming technology that has been around since before IT was even a term, is sometimes the subject of a heated state government debate, occasionally makes headlines at industry events, and it was even featured among the top 10 technology topics on an IEEE Twitter poll from 2020. But how did it become a part of the modern zeitgeist? 

COBOL is now into its seventh decade of usage as a global programming language and continues to be hugely important as a system language for great swaths of the global economy. Age aside, COBOL’s defining characteristics include running systems of record applications in worldwide organizations; supporting all sectors vital to the global economy including banking, transportation, government, and healthcare; comprising billions of lines of application code worldwide; and remaining ubiquitous in the mainframe world.

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Functional JavaScript: Lenses

One of the most interesting talks among the ones I attended in lambda.world was Functional Lenses in JavaScript by FlavioCorpa. He talked about Functional Lenses in a practical way; what’s more, he started with his own small implementation (not for production), and then he talked about different libraries like Ramda or Monocle-TS.

The talk started with an easy-to-understand definition for those of us who are familiar with the procedural/imperative programming: “Lenses are basically functional getters and setters”. Basically, what we get with Lenses is the ability to reuse the data access of a structure in a modular and immutable way, either to obtain the data or to modify it. Later, we will see examples to better understand it.