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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

#181

Post by emmelaich »

guessmyname wrote: post #152
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 know a couple of engineering teams at Apple that are working on new projects in Scala, while also maintaining some legacy systems. Some of these projects are quite critical to the company’s ecosystem, e.g. test systems. I’ve spoken with several engineers who helped create these systems years ago; they’re all now in senior management positions. Some still stand by the technology choices made back then, while others…

Surprised they don't use Swift. Or is that too unstable? Or is there a on-JVM requirement?

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

#182

Post by bigger_cheese »

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 think Perl today is probably closer to COBOL it was massive for a time, felt like it was everywhere.

Nowadays it is increasingly niche. Like COBOL there is still a lot of perl code out in the wild.

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

#183

Post by eslaught »

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…

I wrote a small program in Algol 68 once. It was horrible because it didn't even have heap allocation in the language, so things you'd think of doing in C (e.g., tree data structures) just didn't work. That and all the compiler errors were pure numerical codes which you had to go look up in the manual (not provided). And forget about getting line numbers.

I am very much glad I wasn't alive at the time this was the state of the art.

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

#184

Post by panopticon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #66
rodgerd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About a decade ago I looked into moving some COBOL components off-mainframe (either as COBOL-on-Linux or a rewrite into Java, which itself is really COBOL Mk II at this point), and your point about the operating environment is one of the key elements, but not all of it; there's also the fact that the first big shift to automation, via mainframe assembler and COBOL, is when companies sacked a lot of the folks who knew…

> A rewrite or a replatform is very, very hard and risky as a result; the system is now defined by how the mainframe runs the processes, to a very large degree. And that's why so many neo-banks/fintechs are eating the lunch of the established banks left and right, same for insurance. The "old guard" is unwilling to pay the costs of not just upgrading off of mainframes (aka the rewrite work itself)... but of changing…

Eh, I think the tech stack is less important than the legal and regulatory structure.

Most fintechs aren't banks and partner with a Real Bank™ to provide the actual bank accounts. Fintechs are under much less regulatory scrutiny (for now—that may be changing with recent, high-profile screwups) and can move with much more freedom regardless of the tech stack they've chosen.

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

#185

Post by atrettel »

thayne wrote: post #175
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.

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

I agree that many modern Fortran codes aren't truly "modern" Fortran, but in my experience most codes have at least been ported to Fortran 90, even if they largely keep a lot of Fortran 77 baggage (especially the type system and indentation!). In all of my experience, I've really only encountered a single Fortran code being used currently that is actually Fortran 77 in the flesh. That said, I still think many Fortran codes would benefit from using more modern features, since so many are stuck in the past and are difficult to maintain for that reason.

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

#186

Post by atrettel »

yawnxyz wrote: post #145

huh so are any languages actually dead? ChatGPT mentions FORTRAN, ALGOL, or Pascal... which I don't think are dead at all. Ada I've never heard of, so maybe that one's dead? If they're able to write WebAssembly compilers for all these languages, then they'll probably live forever! The only reason punchcards are "dead" is bc the machines are gone or mostly unavailable...

Fortran is very much not dead.

https://fortran-lang.org/

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

#187

Post by WesleyJohnson »

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.

We're running RM/COBOL on RHEL8 VMs backed powered by VMware. I don't work with it, I'm in a different IT area, but our COBOL codebase supports the lion's share of our day-to-day operations.

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

#188

Post by User23 »

FpUser wrote: post #172
greenavocado wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One can write reliable, and I mean airtight good enough for medical devices and nuclear deterrence, in basically any even vaguely modern language (think Algol-60 or later). It’s simply a matter of disciplined design and running on hardware that’s sufficiently predictable.

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

#189

Post by User23 »

Muromec wrote: post #55
Suppafly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems? It feels like we're getting into that space already.

Nah not really. People just started replacing COBOL with java and employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. It can also be upgraded in smaller chunks and finding enough developers for the tool is an important metric corporate is looking at. If anything, banks are actively optimizing for developer experience to make sure 60% of new hires don’t run away in the first year. If…

> employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement.

Well I hope they’re wise enough to not let any good employment attorneys catch wind because that’s blatantly illegal.

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

#190

Post by chucksmash »

akavi wrote: post #9
mbloom1915 wrote: post #3

almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!

I feel like every time COBOL is mentioned we get these stories about crazy high comp for COBOL developers, but anecdotally my aunt worked on COBOL projects in the mid 2010s and was paid a much more modest 45 $/hr. Good money for small town middle America where she lives, but nowhere close to what a decent JS dev can get.

There's also the difference between what a consulting company bills for the COBOL developer and what they pay the developer. Not every consultant is the captain of their own ship.

My first job after college was a software shop organized in a "services" model, where clients would have to sponsor teams to do feature dev or support beyond initial onboarding. It's been a long time and my memory is hazy, but as I recall I was expected to bill ~40 hours a week to clients and if I only worked 40 hours that week (being OT exempt, this was always the goal), my hourly pay came out to between 10-20% of what the company billed the client.

So $500/hr on the bill and $45/hr on the paycheck both manage to sound plausible, even at the same company.

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