COBOL's gone? Time to tell grandpa his coding skills are officially retro chic.
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
281–290 of 448 posts
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I've been a Java developer for nearly 2 decades, in multi companies, despite being proficient with other languages. Java just happened to pay better.
Nearly all companies I worked for were developing new systems, tools, etc. Rarely I was doing maintenance on "existing larger enterprise systems".
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The bad thing with using a proper language like Perl for admin scripts is that they will degenerate into programs.
The good thing with Bash etc is that they are so bad you wont and when you do it anyway atleast you get some whip lashes for it.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> how much stuff is still on v11 even?
We've had a potential client ask for a PoC in Java 8, to integrate with their current system... But yeah, our product is deployed with Java 11 and since some dependencies have issues with 18, we'll likely stay that way for a few more years
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
This is only true to an extend. We have a lot of digitally inclined workers who’re developing programs or scripts to handle a lot of things for them. It’s imperfect and often wildly insecure and inefficient, but unlike any previous no-code or “standard” solution it actually works. Often in conjunction with “standard” solutions. On one hand you’re correct in that there will always be a need for programmers. I really d…
Another parallel is type foundries and printing presses. At one point people operated these linotype machines which used molten lead. Of course this transitioned to photo typesetting which, to the dismay of everyone had poor results. Along came Donald Knuth and TeX to fix those deficiencies. NOTE: mechanical printing has a profoundly better result no matter what. It is the ink and the impression in paper that makes it superior (for letterforms and such).
So, if AI follows suit, we will witness the dumb (but very knowledgeable) AI start to supplant workers with questionable results; and then someone (or a team) will make a discovery to take it to the limit and it’ll be game over for large swaths of jobs.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems? It feels like we're getting into that space already.
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.
Uhm... loyalty is punnished and workers need to change jobs to keep 'market rate' wages. So dunno about that.
I think it is more about that newcomers to the job market are easier to abuse.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#287condolences to the writer on his grandads passing.
It is a bit of a reality check when words like 'grandpa' are linked to an article from 1992! My brain is expecting the article to be from the 60's, 70's... or possibly 80's.
My world view, it is hard to image a child born in 2000 is 24 years old now. Their grandparents could be as old as I if they had children (and their children) at a young age.
Then I read at the end he was 91 when he passed. He did well! Likely around my Grandads age - and managed to last an extra 24 years on this planet!
I remember reading a book on COBOL in my younger days learning to program, alongside BASIC, C, and Pascal. I might still have it. Despite reading and never coding in it, I have been (fortunate, I guess) to have never programmed in it.
I do agree with the writer that using the word "dead" in the programming language world is unrealistic. Some would argue that there are popular, modern languages out there as being "dead" - but they might get a huge push for one reason or another in the future. Could COBOL find a new, niche spot.
Maybe.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I said it was ironic that we went out of our way to make a newer more complicated to read language that was memory safe when we already had a language that was simpler and readable that was safe. I didn't say I wanted to code in it, though. I'd prefer in no particular order Kotlin, Python, Go, C++, Rust, Perl, C#, Java, Zig, etc. Anything really over COBOL myself. I'm part of the problem. But, if I was hard up…
Is COBOL actually memory safe in the same way Rust is memory safe? I thought it was just "we don't allow dynamic allocation", and I'd assume programmers often implement their own half-baked dynamic allocation on top.
Just like Rust the 'use after free' problem becomes the 'use after it does not make sense' problem instead. Which Valgrind wont find for you either.
I think new Cobol has 'allocate' and 'free' though.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#289Article 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…
> 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
Saying we don't need "programmers" any more was true when a programmer was someone who used very low level languages such as Assembly and probably had used punched cards in the past etc. Languages like cobol / fortran / plsql gave analysts a chance of designing things on paper and handing off to developers or even doing the development themselves which couldn't have happened in the past. Using something like python these days feels like the kind of thing that would have been thought of as a 4gl in those days for some use cases. However, python also works as a general purpose programming language.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#290You 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…
Fortran is alive and well in science and engineering. The more modern standards are much nicer to work with, but largely backwards compatible with stuff written 50 years ago.