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COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

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Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#101

Post by palisade »

sestep wrote: post #75
palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

This is a weird take. Sure, plenty of cool/nice things from old languages (e.g. variable-sized stack frames in Ada) get lost, and some then get rediscovered by future languages, potentially wasting effort. And I don't know COBOL, so maybe you're actually making a good point. But I find that hard to believe. Does COBOL really solve all the same problems Rust is intended to solve? Is it as performant? Can it interface…

A lot to unpack in this question.

Do they solve all the same problems? No, for example COBOL lacks a modern concept of concurrency within a single program. COBOL's concurrency features are based on task-level parallelism, which involves dividing a program into multiple tasks that can be executed concurrently.

Is it performant? Yes. COBOL is highly efficient particularly in handling large datasets and complex business logic and its compilers are optimized for reliability and speed.

Can it interface with native code? Yes.

Does it have a package manager? No.

Does it describe shape of data? No. Data structures in COBOL are defined using fixed-length records.

Note: I'm not a COBOL expert. I did learn it in college, though.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#102

Post by throw-the-towel »

graypegg wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody writes MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ON SIZE ERROR STOP RUN. any more.

I mean, if you squint your eyes a bit, that could be SQL! So even if it's not COBOL, there's people out there writing in a vaguely english business programming language.

And SQL kinda dates from the same era, I wonder if this type of language was in vogue 50 years ago?

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#103

Post by NikolaNovak »

j0hnyl wrote: post #10
msla wrote: post #5

"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.

But are these legacy systems from the 70s, 80s, 90s using modern cobol?

Depends what you mean; but not necessarily.

I am managing an ERP system implemented / went live in 2016. It's working on modern P10 hardware, which was released in 2021. The ERP system is continually updated by the vendor and customized by the client.

Even for COBOL running on an actual mainframe, which I think most HNers would think of 1970s dinosaur, most of the actual machines in production would be pretty new. IBM z16 was launched in 2022.

So they are "legacy systems" in the sense they're not written on a javascript framework which was launched last week, running on lambda instances in AWS :). But they are not "OLD" systems, as such.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#105

Post by spongebobstoes »

shadowgovt wrote: post #47
throw0101b wrote: post #28

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode last year, "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U One reason COBOL systems have been around for so long is because they encoded business rules that need to be understood if you want to try to transfer them to a new system. From the podcast (~16m): > Like when we're working in unemployment insurance, again during…

> ...add edge cases as as later.” There's no permission really to say that. I think there would be some value to closing that feedback loop to give legislators the signal "You know, what you're considering is actually pretty fuzzy conceptually... We're discovering while considering how to code it up that you probably don't actually have good, clear definitions for all the terms in this bill." But the biggest thing to…

My interpretation is a little different. We agree that humans are affected by the edge cases, although I believe that's also true at very large companies like Google or Meta.

I don't think it's about avoiding programming 6700 edge cases, but more so that when you have an excessive number of cases, it's likely an indication that something is being missed. that could be due to a bug in software or due to unclear definitions in the legislation.

in those cases, rather than attempting to program it exactly, it might be better to bring a human into the loop.

and to me, that could be the point of having a tighter feedback loop. because otherwise the developers will just do their best, which will be buggy or incomplete. because they can't not do their job.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#106

Post by jcranmer »

mckn1ght wrote: post #13

Huh, so it mentions 4GLs… what generation would we consider rust/kotlin/swift then?

The idea of programming language generations were based on paradigms of programming that never really caught on. The idea, roughly, is that 3GL are those languages where you specify how something is to be done, 4GL is where you specify what is to be done instead, and 5GL is you specify the problem and the computer does everything for you.

This breaks down with the fact that it's really difficult, outside of really constrained spaces, to turn a "what" specification into a high-performance implementation, so any practical language needs to let you give some degree of control in the "how", and as a result, any modern language is somewhere uncomfortably between the 3GL and 4GL in the paradigm, not fitting entirely well in either category.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#107

Post by palisade »

Muromec wrote: post #95
palisade wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Healthcare, COBOL. Social Security, COBOL. Point of Sale, COBOL. IRS, COBOL. Pension funds? COBOL. Hotel bookings? COBOL. Payroll programs? COBOL. It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more…

I'm a big enjoyer of arcain arts, but I happen to work in a place that actually has it and no -- nobody likes COBOL and it's not cool in any sense.

Well, there is a good reason no one likes it. It isn't cool, I completely agree. Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though? Ya.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#108

Post by aidenn0 »

tombert wrote: post #98
9659 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples. I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.

Fair, I guess the list was “languages that I know were popular at one point but I don’t know anyone really using now”. Ada definitely does seem pretty cool from the little bit I have read about it. I’m not sure why it’s fallen by the wayside in favor of C and its derivatives.

Ada was mandated by the DoD for a bit. My understanding is that, in practice, this involved making a half-hearted effort in Ada, failing and then applying for a variance to not use Ada.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#109

Post by hollerith »

palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

Bizarre comment. No developer who should be allowed anywhere near a computer would ever consider choosing COBOL where Rust is appropriate or vice versa.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#110

Post by RickJWagner »

tombert wrote: post #30

You know, one of these days I really need to sit down and play with some of these "legacy" languages, like Fortran or COBOL or Ada or APL; languages that have certainly fallen out of popularity but are still used in some critical places. It does make me wonder about millions and millions of lines of Java out there; Java has more or less eaten the enterprise space (for better or worse), but is there any reason to thin…

IBM offers a free COBOL plugin for VSCode and a nice tutorial with it.

I started programming in COBOL (circa 1990) and took the tutorial just for fun earlier this year.

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