Rounding up the coverage of the Tropo COBOL launch

April 1st, 2009 by Dan York

It’s been great to see some of the coverage today of our launch of COBOL support on Tropo.com. I thought I’d take a moment to just share some of what I’ve seen:

  • Moshe Yudkowsky posted an announcement/analysis and suggested that perhaps Visual Basic was in the works
  • Jason Goecke was the first out with some sample code for COBOL on Tropo as well as perhaps getting bonus points for including a picture of Grace Hopper, the “mother of COBOL”
  • Industry analyst Dan Miller offered his perspective and included this great quote:
    By looking backward and into the back office, Voxeo breathes new life and new hope to a generation of programmers and developers who thought that lightweight scripting languages with names like Ruby and Groovy had left them in the dust. Opus Research estimates that the number of COBOL programmers (most over 60 years of age) who are ready to speech-enable the front end of complex back office applications outnumber VoiceXML afficionados by a factor of 10. By blowing the dust off old textbooks and programming manuals a reserve army of developers stand ready to try Tropo.

  • We learned by way of a nugram tweet that there is, in fact, a COBOL plugin for Eclipse.
  • And Mark Headd… well, Mark declared COBOL on Tropo new “hotness” and foresees it being a great pickup line in a bar… (Hmmm… we’re not so sure on that, Mark, but maybe it’s just the bars we go to!)

Beyond all that the reaction in the Twittersphere has been fun to see. We particularly enjoyed Todd Spraggins tweet – assuming, of course, that he was using “sick” in the way we think he was.

All in all, it’s been great to see the incredibly positive reaction and we look forward to seeing what else the rest of you do with COBOL on Tropo!


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Related posts:

  1. Voxeo announces COBOL support for Tropo.com voice app platform
  2. Thanks to all who helped with our COBOL for Tropo April 1 news
  3. Slides from Tropo launch now available in SlideShare
  4. Audio of Tropo.com launch at eComm now on IT Conversations
  5. Watch the Tropo.com launch video at eComm by Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor

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One Response to “Rounding up the coverage of the Tropo COBOL launch”

  1. [...] The Tropo Blog All your programming language are belong to us! « Rounding up the coverage of the Tropo COBOL launch [...]

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