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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

#171

Post by wglb »

palisade wrote: post #79
Muromec wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell script is memory safe too, but you don't write anything longer than 100 lines in it for a reason.

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…

The Y2K effort was much more nuanced than this. I was there for it and it was more like highly targeted patching based on carefully crafted test sets and frameworks.

> army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.

No way did all get rewritten. Where source was available, fixes were applied and systems retested.

True drama ensued for programs for which the source was no longer obtainable.

The company I was at during that time had programs that had been in production since at least 1960.

The other effort that took place was attending to the systems during the midnight boundary with everybody either in the office or on call.

The other strong observation was that the risks were very much not understood, with exaggerations both extreme and dismissive. Also not discussed in the popular press at the time was the extent that most of these systems were not truly totally automated.

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

#172

Post by FpUser »

greenavocado wrote: post #165
hardburn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No need to be so dramatic. Shitheads will make software fail in any language. Memory "safety" will not help you correctly and in timely manner calculate position of flight controls for example.

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

#173

Post by Frummy »

It's tragicomical, since it's at the core of renowned institutions I thought surely this must be a world of logical, crisp perfection. A perfectly engineered engine, surely if these systems are so important and at the very center of what makes society work and all flow of money and whatever, geniuses must have perfected it all thrice-over. I wouldn't say reality was equal to 1/expectations^3 , but maybe 1/expectations^2. Probably no one will relate, a COBOL job was the first developer job of a relatively young guy like me. Crash course in tech-debt, decades worth of managerial shortsighted behavior, bureaucracy and all that. At least the naive hope provided energy to learn it better so it wasn't useless. But maybe it veered on delusion when I hoped to rewrite ALL of it in the company I was.

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

#175

Post by thayne »

9659 wrote: post #86
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…

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.

Modern fortran is actually fairly modern too. But most fortran codebases aren't modern fortran, they're Fortran 77. If you're lucky.

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

#176

Post by Lance_ET_Compte »

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…

Scala is the basis for Chisel HDL, which is widely used in the RISC-V design community.

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

#177

Post by darksaints »

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…

It's a shame too. Scala3 is actually an amazing language, and has the best type system out of all of the common functional languages. Part of me wonders if Scala would still have died off if Scala3 came out first.

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

#178

Post by sevensor »

7thaccount wrote: post #117
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.

Ada is pretty cool, but not sure if any more modern than APL. Both are actively maintained and useful in different areas.

While we’re at it, modern Fortran exists and has its boosters. https://fortran-lang.org/

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

#179

Post by jackcviers3 »

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…

We use it for all new services at Writer. Jack Henry, SiriusXM, Starbucks, Disney streaming services, and Capitol One all have services (not data-science) divisions producing new projects in Scala ranging from the last five years to today.

There are many others, of course, bit those are the teams at places people have heard of off of the top of my head. It's far from dead.

What does seem to be dying are the framework-centric Play Akka, and non Airflow raw Spark jobs out there. Now, a lot of that is because they were framework jobs that happened to originate in the scala ecosystem - scala was largely incidental and was chosen because of founding project members' preferences or due to the need to develop a commercial market, imho.

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

#180

Post by mathgorges »

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.

This is fascinating to me as an ex-mainframer that now works on a niche hyperscaler. I would love to learn more!

Will you let me know some of the names in the space so that I can research more? Some cursory searching only brings up some questionably relavent press releases from IBM.

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