COBOL is such a funky language. It feels like the closest I’ll ever get to interacting with a computer via punch cards. I know it’s not that antiquated, but the language is something like 60 years old.
I’ve been doing exercism.org (this link points to my public profile there). It’s a useful way to practice a bunch of different exercises in the browser. I’m also attempting a good faith effort at learning Rust, but I could not resist the urge to finally learn COBOL.
Look at my (unoptimized) code for checking if it’s a leap year below. After I submitted it, I realized there was an easier way: modulo operations. That’s the beauty of sites like exercism, codewars, hackerrank, etc. — I can view how other users got their solutions, provided they were made public. The downside to all three of these sites is at no point do they provide any guidance in these languages. A few years ago I wrote a post (somewhat a complaint post) about doing something similar on LearnPython.org, and that site is nice because it holds your hand but doesn’t require you to do it ‘their way’.
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