Many thanks to all those who joined in our April 1 fun with COBOL on Tropo.com. Particular thanks to Moshe Yudkowsky, Jason Goecke, Dan Miller and Mark Headd for their supporting blog posts. Several people in particular, thought analyst Dan Miller was very serious and contacted me to say “is he aware it is a joke?” (He was.) Thanks to all those who “retweeted” the link and otherwise engaged in some April 1 fun on Twitter. Moshe, particularly, was keeping the conversation going much of the day on Twitter. Props to our long-time friend Thomas Howe for chiming in as well. All in all, it was a good bit of fun.
And for the record, in response to this email I received about my Emerging Tech Talk video on April 1:
Even if this makes me look like a complete geek … but I couldn’t help notice a little inaccuracy in your hilarious COBOL video blog: About upper case letters “… we’re not using that high-order bit …” – this is of course nonsense (or did you knowingly make this mistake)? Neither A-Z nor a-z use the 8th bit; and actually, A-Z have lower codes (65-90) than a-z (97-12)
Yes, the latter half of that video was all just nonsense I was spewing with the intent of providing a plausible-sounding rationale. And yes, in response to someone else’s question, it was very hard to say all that with a straight face.
The irony, of course, is that it would be fairly straightforward for us to actually implement COBOL on Tropo.com given our underlying architecture. We use the JSR 223 scripting framework and so adding support for a language with a JSR 223-compliant scripting engine is simply a matter of us writing a “shim” that lets that scripting engine run on top of Tropo. (Well, then there’s those, oh, wee little details of testing, documentation, etc….. 
So in theory if there was a COBOL JSR-223 scripting engine out there somewhere, it could be something we could add to Tropo. It’s the beauty of the platform and why we are looking to add more languages in the months ahead.
Anyway, thanks again to all who participated last week. We continue to enjoy seeing what you all are doing with building applications on Tropo.com. (And some of you are doing amazing things with the platform!)
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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, cobol, april1, aprilfools
