On the 28th August the UK's air traffic control system to shut down, causing hundreds of flights to be delayed or cancelled. Before now the shutdown was blamed on a vague data processing glitch, but the exact cause has now been disclosed.

In its initial report published on Wednesday, [the National Air Traffic Service] said that at 08:32 on 28 August, its system received details of a flight which was due to cross UK airspace later that day.

The system detected that two markers along the planned route had the same name - even though they were in different places. As a result, it could not understand the UK portion of the flight plan.

This triggered the system to automatically stop working for safety reasons, so that no incorrect information was passed to [the National Air Traffic Service's] air traffic controllers. The backup system then did the same thing.

Martin Rolfe, chief executive of [the National Air Traffic Service], said that the system did "what it was designed to do, i.e. fail safely when it receives data that it can't process".

Hi everyone!

Following the results of the icon poll I am looking to make a new icon for our COBOL community here!

COBOL does not have an official logo like other programming languages. I am worried the current logo communicates that COBOL is an archaic, outdated, or dead language, therefore I am seeking suggestions for alternatives.

For suggestions, please suggest an icon from game-icons.net and what hex colour gradient it should have. A brief explanation of why you chose that image/what it represents would be great too but not required!

An example suggestion format:

• Icon: https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/triceratops-head.html
• Gradiant: 2EE5D2 - A01FC5
• Additional Info (Optional): I chose a Triceratops because a lot of COBOL imagery from third-parties use a Triceratops. The colour gradient is the one used in this post.

This bundle ends in just over 24 hours!

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Megathread for people who want to get started learning COBOL! This list is a working document and will be updated over time.

Feel free to comment with resources you think should be added to this list!

Free Compilers & Extensions

• GnuCOBOL - A free/libre COBOL compiler
• OtterKit - A modern FOSS COBOL compiler
• Learn COBOL - Visual Studio Code Extension
• Visual COBOL Personal Edition - Learn COBOL with Visual Studio or Eclipse

Free Online Training Courses

• Open Mainframe Project - Video materials on IBM Digital Learning Platform, Coursera, Pluralsight, or YouTube
• Micro Focus COBOL Fundamentals - Instructor-led videos, hands-on tutorials, and development tools
• Department of CSIS - COBOL programming tutorials, lectures, exercises, and examples
• Tutorials Point
• Learn COBOL in One Video - YouTube course
• COBOL Programming 101 - YouTube course

Free Books

• Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL
• Visual COBOL: New Application Modernization Tools for the Java Developer

Other Resources

• Wikipedia
• PUB400 - Public IBM i 7.5 server

Raspberry Pi has an official presence over on raspberrypi.social!

Their single-user instance is hosted on a Raspberry Pi. It appears they host their instance using Mythic Beasts, or at least that's what this article states.

Both Lemmy and Mastodon use ActivityPub so are able to federate with one another.

A common statistic I see quoted about COBOL is that there are "more than 200 billion lines of COBOL in existence with an extimated 5 billion of new code [written] annually". This statistic comes from a 1997 study by the Gartner Group. Archive Link Here

A more recent study by Vanson Bourne (commissioned by Micro Focus) in Feburary 2022 estimated that there are actually around 775-850 billion lines of COBOL in daily use. Archive Link Here