Did you know that you can get Fujitsu Cobol version 3 for absolutely nothing?  (The latest versions are paid for, and the new one even targets .Net.)

COBOL was in demand for year 2000 compliance work; so much so there were rumours of recruitment agencies searching retirement homes, looking for retired COBOL programmers…

Anyway, if you’ve ever fancied trying the language considered the most verbose of all time (apparently there’s a disease called “COBOL fingers“, where you wear them down to stumps by typing long complicated mathematical statements in the form “ADD 1 TO SALES GIVING SALES” instead of, say “sales++”, or even “sales = sales + 1″) .

COBOL stands for “COmmon Business Oriented Language”, and the syntax was meant to be understandable by normal humans (that is, not programmers).  However I suspect that it was also a reaction to the terseness of operating systems such as Multics, GEORGE III and Unix, all of which go in for shortened commands such as “ls”, “rm” and “chmod”.

Since then we’ve seen the advance of GUIs, much better development tools (ever tried writing a makefile by hand?) and a plethora of different programming languages.

Still, if you don’t fancy COBOL, how about Intercal?  <evil grin>