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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

#241

Post by enriquto »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #182
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.

> Nowadays it is increasingly niche.

Still, if you buy a brand new mac today, most of the executable scripts in the system are written in perl.

You can check it yourself by running:

    file -bL /bin/* /usr/bin/* | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
As of 2024, macOS is essentially a Perl operation.

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

#242

Post by nasmorn »

solatic wrote: post #239

COBOL is endangered, even for banks and airlines. Just look at the executives who see decide to open new digital banks - they're not building on top of COBOL or mainframes. The old banks will be outmaneuvered by the new ones, and eventually succeed them in the market. The story of languages like COBOL isn't that a language is too deeply embedded to become too expensive to replace. It just means the replacement will h…

A single cobol mainframe application is not a problem for a bank. Big banks are usually made by buying up dozens of other banks so they might have very many of these mainframes running and interoperating. That is where the real insanity lies

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

#243

Post by bad_user »

norir wrote: post #234
bad_user wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I spent 3 years working on scala tooling in my free time. One of my libraries is used by the vast majority of scala users (it is a dependency of other widely used tools). There was growth from 2018-2023 but it has flatlined over the last year. Right when theoretically it should be getting the boost from scala 3 having now been stable for a bit. Personally I feel that scala has too much in the language and the compile…

IMO, there's rarely such a thing as maintenance mode. Projects constantly evolve, and in turn this drives more investment in tooling and the ecosystem needed to keep those projects up. And this investment is what eventually drives more new projects and fresh blood, keeping the language fresh and in demand.

Again, look at Java.

Ofc, there's always the question of what happens with a market that isn't constantly growing due to zero-interest rates phenomenon. I guess we'll see, but IMO, that's problematic for newer languages, not established ones.

I too am a contributor of very popular libraries and am very familiar with ecosystem. One thing to keep in mind is that the language's culture has evolved. When I picked up Scala, back in 2010, the Future pattern and Future-driven libraries were all the rage. Whereas nowadays people prefer alternatives which now includes blocking I/O (Loom), with Future-driven libs being a risk going forward.

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

#244

Post by froh »

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…

> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution.

I intuit this also is an intrinsic limit to LLM based approaches to "you don't need them expensive programmers no more"

with LLMs magically "generating the solution" you move the responsibility for concise expression of the problem up the ladder.

and then you "program" in prompts, reviewing the LLM-proposed formalization ("code").

I other words, the nature of "programming" changes to prompt engineering. alas you still have to understand formal languages (code)...

so there'll always be plenty to do for humans who can "math" :-)

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

#245

Post by martinclayton »

In case anyone is interested...

The SO Developer Surveys give some info on the job market for COBOL as it appears on the average salary versus years-of-experience graphs, which I like as there's as many stories or reasons as you can think of to explain them.

In 2023 there were 222 respondents who averaged 19 years of experience, and an average salary of $75,500. In 2024 the exact number of respondents is not shown, but likely similar based on the color code of the point, but the average experience had dropped to 17 years.

Elsewhere in the graph my favourite open question is: how come the over 2000 respondents mentioning Swift average over 11 years experience in a language that's only been public for 10 years?

2024 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary-comp-total-...

2023 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/?utm_source=so-owned&ut...

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

#246

Post by 8fingerlouie »

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…

> and the IBM 390x aka Z/OS platform along with it

The problem with killing the mainframe is that no other platform really exists that can handle the amount of simultanous IO that you can get on a mainframe. Our mainframe easily processes 100m transactions per hour, with room to spare. And keep in mind that those transactions are for the most part synchronous, and will result in multiple SQL transactions per transaction.

Yes, eventual consistency is a thing, but it's a very bad match with the financial world at least, and maybe also military, insurance or medical/health. You can of course also partition the workload, but again, that creates consistency issues when going across shards.

Also, COBOL is far from dead, but it's slowly getting there. I don't know of a single bank that isn't actively working on getting out of the mainframe, though all projections i've seen says that the mainframe and COBOL will be around until at least 2050.

Give that a thought. That's 26 years of writing COBOL. Considering that COBOL programmers are also highly sought after, and usually well paid, one could literally still begin a career as a COBOL programmer today and almost get a full work life worth of it.

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

#247

Post by clarle »

martinclayton wrote: post #245

In case anyone is interested... The SO Developer Surveys give some info on the job market for COBOL as it appears on the average salary versus years-of-experience graphs, which I like as there's as many stories or reasons as you can think of to explain them. In 2023 there were 222 respondents who averaged 19 years of experience, and an average salary of $75,500. In 2024 the exact number of respondents is not shown, b…

iOS development has been around for quite some time now. Most senior iOS and Cocoa developers probably started with Objective-C before slowly migrating codebases over to Swift.

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

#248

Post by jasfi »

froh wrote: post #244
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…

> The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. I intuit this also is an intrinsic limit to LLM based approaches to "you don't need them expensive programmers no more" with LLMs magically "generating the solution" you move the responsibility for concise expression of the problem up the ladder. and then you "program" in prompts, rev…

A lot of business people want to get something functional that they can sell, and hire a programmer if/when they can afford one. That niche is seeing a lot of uptake with regards to LLM based approaches.

This works for them because an MVP typically isn't a lot of code for what they need, and LLMs have a limited scope within which they can generate something that works.

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

#249

Post by vishnugupta »

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…

I agree with you by and large except for this part.

> COBOL's promise was ... we wouldn't need programmers anymore..average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem

COBOL wasn't intended to be used by an "average" person but rather those with deep domain knowledge. They would know the business processes so well that they could transcribe it in COBOL with little or no need to learn how the computers worked. In some ways similar to analysts/data folks using SQL to communicate with databases.

While at it let me share a few more aspects of the top of my head.

COBOL and 4GLs in general were primarily intended to be used to build business applications; payroll, banking, HRMS, inventory management and so on. Even within that emphasis was more towards batch processing operations to reduce the burden on people doing routine bulk operations like reconciliation.

COBOL harks back to the times when there was no dedicated DBMS software. Which is why you see so much focus on how files are organised and the extensive verbs around files which somewhat resemble SQL today.

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

#250

Post by andsoitis »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #155
_yb2s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we wouldn't need programmers anymore This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time was being able to write raw machine code by hand on paper, and have it work - something few people can or need to do nowadays

> This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. I have heard others and myself describe COBOL in many ways, most involving creative expletive phraseology which would make a sailor blush, but "low level/terse language" is a new one to me. > But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time…

> LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC.

Correct. Fortran, LISP, and COBOL were invented in ‘57, ‘58, and ‘59, respectively.

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