Cobol is dead, really? Read comments and main article - "The code that controls our money" --
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
291–300 of 448 posts
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#292Article 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 spent very little time in the cobol world but what I got is that its use outgrew many times its original design (batch processing not too complex tables/rows). Whenever you start to need complicated state machines and abstractions the language will implode.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>A bit like writing enchantments to force demons to do your bidding.
But without the cool chanting and poetic language; just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :(
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#294With LLMs which programming language used becomes irrelevant. LLMs do not replace programmers yet but they do give programmers incredible leverage making these points moot.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still doesn't beat Assembly, which will continue running on Voyager 1 even after the inevitable demise of our planet. Would survive the end of our solar system too.
Assembly ain't a language. Differs for every chip microarchitecture. Doubt there's many folks who know voyager 1 assembly
Assembly is a language. It’s human readable, not machine readable. Modern assemblers support all kinds of higher level constructs through macros.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#296I 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…
> scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not
Examples?
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ada is pretty cool, but not sure if any more modern than APL. Both are actively maintained and useful in different areas.
While we’re at it, modern Fortran exists and has its boosters. https://fortran-lang.org/
Fortran is used in NumPy, so it's not going anywhere for a while.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#298I 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…
It's a shame too. Scala3 is actually an amazing language, and has the best type system out of all of the common functional languages. Part of me wonders if Scala would still have died off if Scala3 came out first.
ocaml, f# and haskell
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Worse. You're just providing tokens which will get values you don't know or can predict attached to them and trying to influence values which will produce tokens based on rules you don't know, which change all the time for reasons you also don't know. Hopefully the tokens you get are the ones you're hoping for, and if you don't have complete mastery of the subject you won't know if they are the tokens you need or can even trust their meaning.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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