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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

#251

Post by andsoitis »

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…

> The general consensus is that if Kotlin had been available at the time, or if Swift had been a viable option for back-end services, they definitely wouldn’t have chosen Scala for those projects.

But they were not.

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

#252

Post by actionfromafar »

cyberax wrote: post #199
actionfromafar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great! Time to jump on the Ada bandwagon then! ;)

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

#253

Post by martinclayton »

clarle wrote: post #247
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.

I think this must be it, or at least this is one story that fits.

Seems a shame that people report Objective-C experience as Swift experience to such a great extent. These surveys are not resumes...

Perhaps it just "proves" that all data in these charts is questionable.

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

#254

Post by Ekaros »

ghosty141 wrote: post #35
akavi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar experience with a friend of mine. I feel like these high salaries only apply to people who habe worked at one of these companies for a looong time.

High salaries are when a grey beard consultant is bought in for a few months to fix something or implement some new regulation. And I don't think it was that high was ever as high as financialised tech companies managed.

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

#255

Post by FLT8 »

20 years ago I worked on a mainframe system that, at the time, was said to have "18 months to live". Fast forward to today, the system is more entrenched than it ever was, and still has "18 months to live".. I'm convinced it will outlive me, and probably the next generation too.

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

#256

Post by Ekaros »

Suppafly wrote: post #48
graypegg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you squint your eyes a bit, that could be SQL! So even if it's not COBOL, there's people out there writing in a vaguely english business programming language.

seriously sometimes writing SQL feels more like composing a google query than programming.

Well, it is in the name. Structured Query Language. And I would argue that it is very often right mind send. You are trying to query data, not process it. Thus actually making it query seems rather reasonable paradigm.

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

#257

Post by Muromec »

gerdesj wrote: post #156
Muromec wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a major drawback to this approach -- you need to have somebody who knows what they are doing. Total deal breaker in most of the places that have this problem in the first place.

"you need to have somebody who knows what they are doing" That applies everywhere. Your parent comment has managed to stuff a mainframe in a container and suddenly, hardware is no longer an issue. COBOL is well documented too so all good and so too will be the OS they are emulating. I used to look after a System 36 and I remember a creaking book shelf. The code base may have some issues but it will be well battle tes…

It's not the point I'm trying to make. Yes you can do fancy stuff like that and de-mainframing COBOL is to run in on k8s is the path I would personally choose if I had to deal with it. It sounds like a lot of fun and the sense of accomplishment to finally have it running should be great.

The problem is -- it's very smart and unique, while organizations that have this kind of a problem don't want to depend on unique set of skills of a few highly capable individuals. Everything needs to be boring and people have to be replaceable.

In this paradigm, vendor java with aws lock-in is a cost, but in-house fancy stuff with cobol on k4s done by smart people in house is worse -- it's a risk.

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

#258

Post by Muromec »

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…

>If I'm the CTO of an airline, do I want to shell out money to make it happen, risk it blowing up in my face, or should I just pay IBM to keep the lights on

But that's the thing, we are at the point when "keep paying IBM" isn't the acceptable answer anymore.

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

#259

Post by Muromec »

psjs wrote: post #136
Muromec wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Nobody wants to have the COBOL problem again, so the developer hiring money follows the programming language popularity market (with a certain regulatory approved laf ofc)

“laf” or “lag”?

Lag of course. Math doors only open once in 25 years, you know the drill.

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

#260

Post by IshKebab »

francisofascii wrote: post #26
IshKebab wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a myth to me. I actually looked up COBOL salaries and they were a bit higher (like 20%) but definitely not enough to make them tempting.

There is typically a big difference between a consultant's hourly rate and a full time salary hourly rate.

Yeah exactly. I was comparing like for like (contracts or full time). The difference due to the fact that it was COBOL was definitely not enough to make me want to learn COBOL.
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