Howdy Yens!

I've had the COBOL Meetup for a good long time now. At first, I was the only member. But I kept to the regularly scheduled meetups, just in case a lurker who had not joined, showed up. For the longest time none showed. Then, when we started to get members, I'd started to really increase my involvement with the Cleveland Web Design and Development Meetup Group.

Well now I have some help over there. Besides that I've started to get more heavily involved in the COBOL community. First, I'm working with the Open Cobol project, a free and open source Cobol compiler at http://www.opencobol.org/ Also I'm starting to hit the books hard once again on relearning my COBOL skills. Much easier I should say than it was learning PHP.

In the process I wrote the 99 bottles of beer program as an exercise. http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/c.html Tonight one of our group told me he had read that one of the complaints about COBOL was that it was over verbose. So I showed him some differences in how I could code something in COBOL, more or less verbose, as I chose. Then I printed out my version of the 99 bottles song, a PHP5 version and a C version. COBOL was 1.5 pages long. PHP was 2.5 pages long. C was 3.5 pages long. Just an interesting point that any program can be as slim or as verbose as we want.

So that brings me to the point of this email. I would like to get together and meet a couple other COBOL programmers. So are any of yall interested in setting up a lunch or dinner meeting? We could meet at a burger place, and chat about COBOL history and future.

So just give me a ring if any of yall are interested or respond to this email, so everyone can see who all is interested.

Kind Regards,
Joseph James Frantz
[masked]