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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

#221

Post by Spooky23 »

kjellsbells wrote: post #161
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.

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…

Like anything else, some places are awesome, some not. I’ve seen both. The worst ones are just like modern places with overcustomized PeopleSoft or SAP - except the blobs of off the shelf software were purchased 30 years ago by people long dead.

Other places stopped development 20 years ago and surrounded the mainframe with now legacy middleware. A lot of the “COBOL” problems with unemployment systems during COVID were actually legacy Java crap from the early 2000s that sat between the mainframe and users.

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

#222

Post by wholinator2 »

mozman wrote: post #216
jackcviers3 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a fellow vendor for one of those names you dropped - I recommend you not to name any companies.

Why? Googling every name given returns public job postings for (senior) scala engineers. Presumably scala divisions at these companies are public knowledge?

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

#223

Post by winrid »

empathy_m wrote: post #111
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…

Does Twitter still have software in Scala?

Yes https://github.com/twitter

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

#224

Post by Spooky23 »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4
cwbriscoe wrote: post #2

Started my career doing Y2K stuff in 1998 and I still touch COBOL here and there today. I have a 10,000 line CICS program that runs every 30 seconds that I wrote in 2010. It has never failed since.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

If the python script has external dependencies… lol.

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

#225

Post by Spooky23 »

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!

That’s for specialists for the mainframe or specific skill.

Generalists are usually offshored and are cheap.

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

#226

Post by jillesvangurp »

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!

Not a bad gig to take if you can swallow your pride a bit.

I bet LLMs can make working with COBOL a lot easier and more fun than it ever was. I bet that's true for a lot of legacy stuff.

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

#227

Post by jsrcout »

atrettel wrote: post #185
thayne wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The codebase I've been working in lately is mostly pre-77 FORTRAN, maintained as such for all this time. "Stuck in the past" is an apt description.

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

#228

Post by jamesfinlayson »

makeitdouble wrote: post #193
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah that my impression too - I haven't worked in banking but I've worked at a few places with core functionality written in Fortran and then web-facing API layers on top of that (some was in Java in think).

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

#229

Post by bloppe »

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…

Even LLMs have not realized the dream of a natural language computer interface. Everyone who uses them significantly has to read up on prompt engineering and add little things like "explain your steps" or "describe it like I'm 5" or other oddly specific sequences of characters to get the results they want. That's not natural language. It's a DSL.

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

#230

Post by calibas »

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…

COBOL is undead.
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