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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

#121

Post by actionfromafar »

aidenn0 wrote: post #108
tombert wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Often, I'm sure, but there are large code bases in Ada still. It's a shame, it looks like a really great language I would love. But it's a chicken and egg problem. If only Mozilla had decided on Ada instead of Rust! :-)

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

#122

Post by 7thaccount »

hollerith wrote: post #109
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.

I don't think the use cases for Cobol (bank software) typically overlap with those for Rust (operating systems...etc).

It's like saying no gardener should be allowed near a garden that would choose a shovel over a pair of shears. Both have a place.

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

#123

Post by toast0 »

arcticbull wrote: post #87
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…

Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us. [edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters…

"Legacy code" is also known as "the important code that makes the business work"

If these new fangled languages are so great, one day they can be legacy code too. :P

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

#124

Post by actionfromafar »

flatpepsi17 wrote: post #62

Article starts mentioning 4GL's - a term I have not heard in a long, long time. COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore. A lot like "low code" platforms, and now LLM generated code. The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. When you get down to breaking down that problem... you b…

Vision 4GL. Like VB but cross platform and with a horribly unstable IDE which would corrupt the source code. (Which was in some kind of binary format not amenable to source control.)

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

#125

Post by crackez »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #54
Muromec wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobol is still there not because of cobol itself, but because of vendor and platform lock-in. And I guess having monolithic codebase/platform. it’s not even esoteric and difficult, just a lot of it without much structure visible to you.

This is what people miss about COBOL. It's not like people are compiling COBOL and running it on Linux on an x86 box. They are running it on legacy operating systems (and hardware) which provide a different set of underlying services. It's a whole different planet.

Negativo friendo.

The mainframe is turning into a middleware layer running on Enterprise Linux. We've containerized the mainframe at this point, and I mean that directly - eg. Running jcl, multiple CICS regions, all in COBOL that originated on z/OS is now running in k8s on amd64.

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

#126

Post by Muromec »

palisade wrote: post #107
Muromec wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though?

It's performant, you can't take away that.

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

#127

Post by zozbot234 »

hollerith wrote: post #109
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.

Agreed. It's easy to have memory safety when you don't even support heap allocation. Now if OP had said "Java" or "C#" instead of "COBOL", they would've had a solid point. But the way Rust ensures memory safety without mandating GC while still allowing for complex allocation patterns can be said to be practically unfeasible for any of the usual "legacy" languages, with the notable exception of Ada.

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

#128

Post by danielmarkbruce »

crackez wrote: post #125
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people miss about COBOL. It's not like people are compiling COBOL and running it on Linux on an x86 box. They are running it on legacy operating systems (and hardware) which provide a different set of underlying services. It's a whole different planet.

Negativo friendo. The mainframe is turning into a middleware layer running on Enterprise Linux. We've containerized the mainframe at this point, and I mean that directly - eg. Running jcl, multiple CICS regions, all in COBOL that originated on z/OS is now running in k8s on amd64.

Yup, but the COBOL application doesn't know you've done that.

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

#129

Post by Muromec »

toast0 wrote: post #123
arcticbull wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us. [edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters…

"Legacy code" is also known as "the important code that makes the business work" If these new fangled languages are so great, one day they can be legacy code too. :P

That's not what makes something legacy. Legacy is something highly not advisable to change because it's both makes the business work and can't be easily changed because of complexity, loss of context, high blast radius or whatever. It's just there and you have to deal with it. If it wasn't complex, opaque and scary to touch it would not have been just another piece of something to be replaced and updated like the copyright date in the footer.

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

#130

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

7thaccount wrote: post #116
norir wrote: post #38

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…

I assume it became less popular when Java became more bearable.

And kotlin came around with great IDE support, and with good features without the complexity of scals
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