111–120 of 448 posts
I think of scala in this context. I think that scala is basically dead at this point in the way that COBOL was framed in the article. Yes, there are still many businesses/services that have critical components written in scala but current mindshare has cratered for new projects. I only single out scala because I have spent a lot of time with it and have seen it go through the hype cycle (in 2012-14 it seemed like I w…
A touching article! I have enjoyed similar times with my grandpa. On the topic of Cobol, I simply don't understand why people hate it so much. It has a shallow learning curve like Python, is self-documenting enough that one doesn't need to write a bunch of text, and is available on every conceivable architecture, with great performance. I personally wrote a payroll for an entire factory on a B1800 with 128K of memory…
"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.
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.
I didn't say I wanted to code in it, though. I'd prefer in no particular order Kotlin, Python, Go, C++, Rust, Perl, C#, Java, Zig, etc. Anything really over COBOL myself. I'm part of the problem.
But, if I was hard up for money and wasn't getting nibbles for jobs? I could see getting into COBOL because there is a lot of money in it and always work available.
My statement stands though, we need to do better when designing the syntax of our languages. Cobol is disliked, yet simple and readable. What does that say about our new languages. How hated are our "new" language remnants going to be when few of us are longer around to maintain them 50 - 75 years from now? And, how easy are they going to be to pick up?
Addendum: I guess it won't matter if the singularity comes and just writes it all for us, of course. Then it will all just be machine code and we won't need these "only human" translation layers any longer.
I think of scala in this context. I think that scala is basically dead at this point in the way that COBOL was framed in the article. Yes, there are still many businesses/services that have critical components written in scala but current mindshare has cratered for new projects. I only single out scala because I have spent a lot of time with it and have seen it go through the hype cycle (in 2012-14 it seemed like I w…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?
IBM offers just such a service under the WatsonX branding, it's an LLM to convert COBOL to Java: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z I work at a company with a large COBOL codebase and this has been mentioned in a few presentations about our modernization efforts.
Nowadays, even if someone is right about something and most people are doing it wrong, nobody will care to even discuss it unless the person making the statement is one of maybe 3 top influencers in that field.
A touching article! I have enjoyed similar times with my grandpa. On the topic of Cobol, I simply don't understand why people hate it so much. It has a shallow learning curve like Python, is self-documenting enough that one doesn't need to write a bunch of text, and is available on every conceivable architecture, with great performance. I personally wrote a payroll for an entire factory on a B1800 with 128K of memory…
Its the amount of boiler plate that people hate.
The bigger problem: COBOL was an open standard but none of the implementations were open source for ages (I haven’t looked at GNU COBOL in years, but I think this is no longer the case) so nobody was building new things or experience when they had to pay to get started.