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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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

zdragnar wrote: post #139
Smar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> print food if tasty? Ruby is nice.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but I genuinely dislike conditions placed afterwards. They feel great to type out when you're in the flow, but coming back and reading them grates on my nerves. Seeing the condition first means I load a logical branch into my mental context. Seeing the condition after means I have to rewrite the context of what I just read to become part of a logical branch, and now the flow of reading is bro…

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by mhh__ »

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…

Scala3 looks fairly interesting.

The problem however is that I can't be bothered to roll out a JDK, and secondly if I did it might encourage someone else to start writing Java again internally. Risky payoff...

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

#193

Post by makeitdouble »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #99
snovymgodym wrote: post #40

As always, these discussions will depend on your definition of "dead" and "alive". If we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it, then I think we can safely call COBOL dead (and the IBM 390x aka Z/OS platform along with it, for which "COBOL" is usually a proxy). But if we say that anything still being used in production is not dead, then of course COBOL is alive and significantly more alive tha…

> we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it You don’t suppose any bank - or other large financial institution - might have standardised on Cobol for their core business flows/processes? In which case a new business-unit or “internal startup” team (e.g. a new category of insurance product) might very-well have some part written in Cobol so it integrates with the rest of the bank - or at very-le…

I was under the impression that banks with core COBOL processes all had an intermediate layer in Java/C# to deal with these kind of integration.

We saw exactly the case of a new business unit being created, and like most other units it wouldn't get direct access to the lowest layer, and interact instead with a saner level of API and modules in the language of their stack.

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

#194

Post by User23 »

zdragnar wrote: post #139
Smar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> print food if tasty? Ruby is nice.

Maybe I'm in a minority, but I genuinely dislike conditions placed afterwards. They feel great to type out when you're in the flow, but coming back and reading them grates on my nerves. Seeing the condition first means I load a logical branch into my mental context. Seeing the condition after means I have to rewrite the context of what I just read to become part of a logical branch, and now the flow of reading is bro…

Try thinking of it as prefix if and infix if?

And in any event it’s a very natural language pattern if you know what I mean.

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

#195

Post by yourapostasy »

mathgorges wrote: post #180
crackez wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like they’re talking about running IBM Wazi on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. As far as I know, there isn’t a System z-on-a-container offering, like you install from a Helm Chart or comes to you from an OCI registry. If it is the IBM I know, it’s completely out of reach of most homelab’ers and hobbyists.

IBM Wazi As A Service is supposed to be more affordable than the self hosted version and the Z Development and Test Environment (ZD&T) offering. ZD&T is around $5000 USD for the cheapest personal edition, so maybe around $2500-3500 USD per year?

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

#197

Post by User23 »

Muromec wrote: post #78
sestep wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird take. Sure, plenty of cool/nice things from old languages (e.g. variable-sized stack frames in Ada) get lost, and some then get rediscovered by future languages, potentially wasting effort. And I don't know COBOL, so maybe you're actually making a good point. But I find that hard to believe. Does COBOL really solve all the same problems Rust is intended to solve? Is it as performant? Can it interface…

Imagine having a shell script being called from a cron job that writes data in a bunch of tab separated memory mapped files (memory mapping happens when you configure the thing), but you have more files than memory. And all the shell scripts call and include each other and have global variables too. And that underpins most of the critical infrastructure in your country.

Except mainframe IO and interrupts actually work reliably. Unix on the other hand is a proud member of the worse is better club. It still doesn’t really handle interrupts correctly, but thanks to 40 years of kludges most people consider it close enough.

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

#198

Post by 9659 »

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++.

yes, this is true. mainly due to a perceived lack of ada programmers on the market.

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

#199

Post by cyberax »

actionfromafar wrote: post #121
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.

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! :-)

Ada doesn't offer any safety for dynamic memory. In fact, Ada is now adopting Rust's approach with the borrow checker.

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

#200

Post by ecshafer »

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…

Fortran is pretty nice to write in if you are just writing numerical stuff. If I were just doing a pure numerical simulation, I would rather do it in fortran than c++ or python (without numpy which is just fortran and c++)
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