COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented [programming] Language) dates back to 1959, and is still used in its realm of business software, mostly on mainframe computers. Of course, there are also many related software modernization and migration projects. Thus, once in a while even non-mainframe developers might need some COBOL knowledge. Commercial _COBOL_ systems, especially on real mainframes, are expensive. In this article I demonstrate how to set up the GnuCOBOL compiler and integrate it with Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux, but it also works on Windows and macOS. This way, experimenting with COBOL becomes easy and cheap.
Using snippets from compilable source code files in prosa documents is a great approach. By doing so, I can make sure that the source code actually compiles. By adding unit tests, I can even make sure it does what it's supposed to do. I knew such is possible with AsciiDoc/AsciiDoctor, but does it also work if AsciiDoctor is run via JBake?
Finally, I had enough time to migrate my website and blog from WordPress to JBake, a static website generator written in Java. In this article I explain why I switched the technology and how I automatically migrated my contents -- conversion-script included.
While researching why so many people like Python, I found and article which showed how much more readable Python code is compared to Java code. I was curious how well Kotlin does that job.
This article demonstrates how at least some uses cases for an object spread operator can be implemented with Kotlin.
