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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

#261

Post by Muromec »

User23 wrote: post #189
Muromec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah not really. People just started replacing COBOL with java and employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. It can also be upgraded in smaller chunks and finding enough developers for the tool is an important metric corporate is looking at. If anything, banks are actively optimizing for developer experience to make sure 60% of new hires don’t run away in the first year. If…

> employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. Well I hope they’re wise enough to not let any good employment attorneys catch wind because that’s blatantly illegal.

It's not a requirement, but the outcome of hiring results demographics wise is very visible.

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

#262

Post by SonOfLilit »

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…

The need applies everywhere, the difficulty of fulfilling it tends to be an order of magnitude more in places that tend to run COBOL.

I'm working at one. You wouldn't believe the stories.

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

#263

Post by rbanffy »

bloppe wrote: post #229
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.

Worse. It’s a DSL without a formal specification. You are writing prompts blindly in hopes they trigger the desired behaviour from the LLM.

A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding.

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

#264

Post by ithkuil »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #50
ithkuil wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you hear about people being paid $X vs 10x$X to fix some cobol; is there a correlation between the age of the cobol system?

Probably not; just a matter of how desperate they are.

Which is also a function of how hard it is to find someone who has the required skills to address the problem

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

#265

Post by tannhaeuser »

vishnugupta wrote: post #249
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…

> COBOL and 4GLs in general

COBOL dates back to 1959, much earlier than 4GLs, and the cited 1992/1999 articles make the point that 4GLs were poised to replace the likes of COBOL and FORTRAN when in fact those dinosaurs, or rather nautili since still living, turned out to outlive 4GLs except SQL (when counted as 4GL).

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

#266

Post by int_19h »

unscaled wrote: post #231
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…

4GL were supposed to be even more of that, with more "human-language-like" constructs added to the language to deal with things besides general logic, simple data structures and arithmetic. The author mentions "4GLs" were all the rage in the early 1990s, but I doubt that that was true outside of the mainframe world. The 4GL movement, as a conscious movement, seems to have always been highly mainframe oriented (the Wi…

dBase and its numerous descendants and competitors (FoxPro, Clipper etc) were extremely popular for line-of-business desktop applications in the 90s. And, yes, they are indeed traditionally categorized as 4GLs - and, given how nebulous the definition always has been anyway, I think that "traditionally categorized" is the most practical definition that you can use here.

But, yes, I agree that aside from the generally more verbose and sometimes unwieldy syntax, there wasn't really that much to it in practice. I did work with FoxPro, and the reason why it was popular was not because you had to write things like "ACTIVATE WINDOW", but because it had many things baked directly into the language that nicely covered all the common tasks a pre-SQL data-centric app would need - e.g. a loop that could iterate directly over a table.

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

#267

Post by int_19h »

bad_user wrote: post #243
norir wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 growin…

I don't think many people would describe Java as "fresh" these days. In demand, sure, but this is overwhelmingly driven by existing large enterprise codebases. Also, for all the talk about nifty new features, how much stuff is still on v11 even?

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

#268

Post by moomin »

vishnugupta wrote: post #249
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 my experience, often it’s hard to find that person with deep domain knowledge, and even when they do, it’s unstructured, they take things for granted they shouldn’t* and the have no appreciation of the demands of formalism.

Getting anything you can use to construct a work plan, never mind a detailed feature list, out of clients can be a dark art.

*To the point I have repeatedly experienced a point close to the end of the project where they go “What do you mean you don’t handle a case I have failed to mention for the entire duration of the project?”

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

#269

Post by int_19h »

7thaccount wrote: post #117
9659 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples. I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.

Ada is pretty cool, but not sure if any more modern than APL. Both are actively maintained and useful in different areas.

Ada has seen quite a few major features added to it in the past couple of decades.

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

#270

Post by moomin »

andsoitis wrote: post #250
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count.
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