Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wumpus-cave.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 448 posts

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

#161

Post by kjellsbells »

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.

I hope you're right, but many comments here on HN suggest their experience with mainframes is very different. z/OS and its predecessors provided so many services completely transparently to the application that a mainframe to modernity migration is doomed to fail unless it can completely emulate (or design around) the capabilities provided by the OS and other subsystems.

Even ignoring the needs of the super high end customers like banks (eg, cpus in lockstep for redundancy), being able to write your app and just know that inter-node message passing is guaranteed, storage I/O calls are guaranteed, failover and transaction processing is guaranteed, just raises the bar for any contender.

K8s is wonderful. Can it make all the above happen? Well, yes, given effort. If I'm the CTO of an airline, do I want to shell out money to make it happen, risk it blowing up in my face, or should I just pay IBM to keep the lights on, kick the can down the road, and divert precious capital to something with a more obvious ROI? I think their "no disasters on my watch/self preservation" instinct kicks in, and I can't really blame them.

HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36846195

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

#162

Post by alfalfasprout »

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…

What about spark? Given the incredible adoption of spark across the industry I don't see scala going away anytime soon.

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

#164

Post by electroly »

_yb2s wrote: post #69
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…

> we wouldn't need programmers anymore This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper, and have it work - something few people can or need to do nowadays

Do you mean something other than "terse" here? Or are you perhaps thinking of a different language? I cannot possibly imagine that adjective being used to describe COBOL. It is the #1 textbook example of a verbose language--the opposite of terse.

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

#165

Post by greenavocado »

hardburn wrote: post #141
aidenn0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually met a programmer who worked on military jets. According to her, Ada is only used anymore for the older jets that were already programmed in it, and she worked in C++.

Military jets coded in C++. God help us all.

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

#167

Post by analog31 »

Animats wrote: post #14
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.

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

Man that's almost like Hypercard.

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

#168

Post by karlgkk »

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…

> in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems?

I kinda suspect that if Java is still around in 30 years, what we call Java will be - at best - vaguely recognizable.

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

#169

Post by strken »

palisade wrote: post #115
hollerith wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, I said it was ironic that we went out of our way to make a newer more complicated to read language that was memory safe when we already had a language that was simpler and readable that was safe. 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…

Is COBOL actually memory safe in the same way Rust is memory safe? I thought it was just "we don't allow dynamic allocation", and I'd assume programmers often implement their own half-baked dynamic allocation on top.

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

#170

Post by _yb2s »

electroly wrote: post #164
_yb2s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we wouldn't need programmers anymore This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper, and have it work - something few people can or need to do nowadays

Do you mean something other than "terse" here? Or are you perhaps thinking of a different language? I cannot possibly imagine that adjective being used to describe COBOL. It is the #1 textbook example of a verbose language--the opposite of terse.

What I mean is that it is an attempt to make a high level domain specific language, but is not my modern standards
Post reply on HN