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

201–210 of 448 posts

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

#201

Post by jtolmar »

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 can't say whether Java as a whole will ever become the next COBOL, but Java 8 already is well on the way there.

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

#202

Post by pklausler »

atrettel wrote: post #186
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/

Fortran’s doing fine, but that discourse is not very useful.

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

#203

Post by BirAdam »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #179
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…

That’s precisely why people think it died. It became stable and therefore useful. It is therefore not talked about every 3 seconds by startup founders.

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

#204

Post by bad_user »

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 very much alive and kicking.

https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2024/09/12/language-rankings-6-2...

The initial hype has died off and that's OK. The hype cycle is inevitable for all languages. Also, predictions rarely happen, mostly because the landscape has changed. Mainstream programming languages can no longer die like Cobol did.

E.g., Java has been dying ever since 2001, surviving the dotcom bubble, .NET, the P in LAMP, Ruby, JS, or Go. Python was supposed to die on its version 3 migration, with people supposedly moving to Ruby.

FWIW, Scala is the world's most popular FP language, it has good tooling, and libraries, and Scala 3 is a wonderful upgrade.

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

#205

Post by Yodel0914 »

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’m not sure I’d choose to use Fortran, but at one point I had to maintain an app that had a Delphi UI and Fortran business logic. The Fortran, although spaghetti, was much less frustrating to work with.

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

#206

Post by accra4rx »

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 work as a SA] . There are many companies that don't have a original COBOL source code only compiled objects which has been running for more than few decades. How can you guarantee that it will run perfectly in k8s . Major companies can never take that risk unless you give them some insurance against failure

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

#208

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #162
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.

Probably PySpark and similar connectors are robust enough now that they are not necessarily joined at the hip like they were 10 years ago. If you were working in Spark at the maximal of its hype cycle around then you basically had to use Scala in at least some extent - even if it was simply a core team exposing native API’s in other languages - since it was the most native approach that exposed all the apis you needed. Nowadays probably other languages and wrappers have caught up enough that using Scala is not such the absolute requirement it was before.

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

#209

Post by LarsDu88 »

diggan wrote: post #140
LarsDu88 wrote: post #138

As long as there are tactical nukes that depend on COBOL, COBOL ain't dead. We might all die, but COBOL will sit happy in its steel reinforce nuclear bunker

Still doesn't beat Assembly, which will continue running on Voyager 1 even after the inevitable demise of our planet. Would survive the end of our solar system too.

Assembly ain't a language. Differs for every chip microarchitecture. Doubt there's many folks who know voyager 1 assembly

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

#210

Post by wvenable »

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…

My company is finally upgrading away from a product that is written in a 4GL language. This product probably started out on a Unix but was ported to Windows decades ago. It has both a web and classic VB front ends.

All the source code is available and theoretically I could make changes and compile it up. The language itself is basically just plain procedural code but with SQL mixed right in -- somewhat like DBase or Foxpro but worse. I think the compiler produces C code and is then compiled with C compiler but it's been a while since I looked into it. Requires a version of Kornshell for Windows as well.

Post reply on HN