COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#2Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port. Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files, monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so on.
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#3The point of this seems to be highlighting the micro focus cloud migration marketing piece at the end. Besides some history, very little here.
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#4This is just Micro Focus astroturfing! They don't have a business in a world where banks and government agencies have written their software in a modern language.
Here's a comment I made a month ago about another thinly-veiled Micro Focus press release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#5This is just Micro Focus astroturfing! They don't have a business in a world where banks and government agencies have written their software in a modern language. Here's a comment I made a month ago about another thinly-veiled Micro Focus press release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206
Why would they undertake such a massive task if they don’t have the need?
It’s cheaper to pay for training so new hires can write obsolete languages on IBM’s last innovative release (the AS400).
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#6Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port. Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files, monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so on.
Seems like a lot of that could be emulated or made part of a virtual machine
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#7Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port. Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files, monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so on.
Seems like a lot of that could be emulated or made part of a virtual machine
Technically, yes. Legally, no. See the Hercules emulator for example.
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#8This is just Micro Focus astroturfing! They don't have a business in a world where banks and government agencies have written their software in a modern language. Here's a comment I made a month ago about another thinly-veiled Micro Focus press release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206
Why would they undertake such a massive task if they don’t have the need? It’s cheaper to pay for training so new hires can write obsolete languages on IBM’s last innovative release (the AS400).
I work in fintech, and my company is switching over to Java. It's gonna take a few more years, but they are implementing more than legacy code.
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#9Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port. Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files, monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so on.
It also requires porting something quite intangible over, too. In the days that COBOL was relevant, we took a very long time to write software, and we did a mostly competent job at it.
These days, even if we were using COBOL, we probably wouldn't have as robust and reliable results.
"Move fast and break things" honestly has me sold, unless it's my bank account. Many of the people who know COBOL move slow and don't do halfjobs.
Re: COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they undertake such a massive task if they don’t have the need? It’s cheaper to pay for training so new hires can write obsolete languages on IBM’s last innovative release (the AS400).
I work in fintech, and my company is switching over to Java. It's gonna take a few more years, but they are implementing more than legacy code.
That's exactly why "Java is the new Cobol" is an occasionally-heard slogan.