I have never been as annoyed at something as I am now with my COBOL class. I am truly sick of having every single assignment description begin "You will write a program to process a file containing an indefinite number of 80-character records...," and having the assignment itself be supremely tedious instead of challenging.

Aye, there's the rub. The programs do take a nontrivial amount of time to write simply because of the typing required, and for some of them, we're just supposed to translate pseudocode from the notes into COBOL.

At this point some of you might be thinking, "He's got it easy! What's he complaining about?" I will risk getting what I wish for and say that I'd like an interesting problem to solve. I know, I know...90% of business programming is writing or maintaining this kind of stuff. I still don't have to like it.

I hope I never have to take a job doing "business" programming.

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