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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

#31

Post by ang_cire »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4
cwbriscoe wrote: post #2

Started my career doing Y2K stuff in 1998 and I still touch COBOL here and there today. I have a 10,000 line CICS program that runs every 30 seconds that I wrote in 2010. It has never failed since.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

If you're actually patching your python installs, that is by no means certain.

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

#32

Post by yieldcrv »

_old_dude_ wrote: post #11
bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

COBOL changes very slowly, once in a decade or two. Python does not offer support of a release for more than 3 years and a half [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

But a compute instance or bare metal computer that never needs a new release wont have to deal with that in python either

Its only new builds on someone else’s computer that have this modern issue

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

#33

Post by _w1tm »

ang_cire wrote: post #31
bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

If you're actually patching your python installs, that is by no means certain.

I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.

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

#34

Post by supportengineer »

cwbriscoe wrote: post #2

Started my career doing Y2K stuff in 1998 and I still touch COBOL here and there today. I have a 10,000 line CICS program that runs every 30 seconds that I wrote in 2010. It has never failed since.

That's what I liked about developing Oracle stored procedures activated by cron jobs. Ran for 5 years, no maintenance needed.

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

#35

Post by ghosty141 »

akavi wrote: post #9
mbloom1915 wrote: post #3

almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!

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.

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

#36

Post by zozbot234 »

graypegg wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody writes MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ON SIZE ERROR STOP RUN. any more.

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.

The nice thing about a vaguely English like language is that your average LLM is going to do a better job of making sense of it. Because it can leverage its learnings from the entire training set, not just the code-specific portion of it.

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

#37

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

_old_dude_ wrote: post #11
bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

COBOL changes very slowly, once in a decade or two. Python does not offer support of a release for more than 3 years and a half [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

I could believe there are legacy installations happily humming away on Python 2.7 without issue.

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

#38

Post by norir »

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 was constantly seeing doing $X in scala pieces on HN and I almost never see it referenced here anymore). It's probably a natural and inevitable phenomenon (and a bit of a shame because scala did get some things right that other mainstream languages still have not).

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

#39

Post by WaitWaitWha »

(Programming) languages take very long to "die". Most often you will get a long drawn out tail, and often parts of a language gets absorbed into other languages. Only the sages and etymologists will know where they have come from.

Old man reminiscence following, skip if you are not bored:

I worked with SNOBOL and I thought it will be a long term programming language. I also want to think that I had some tiny, minuscule hand in dev of RIPscrip pre-Telegraphix, alas it went as the dodo bird.

I think I have forgotten more programming languages than I can count on my hands. Yet, I see them in some part every day in newer languages, "discovered" by some expert. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

One language has come to my aid for the last 30-ish years Perl has came to my aid many times.

(I tell you a secret - in the deep deep bowels of a a very, very large, jungle named company, servers still have tiny Perl scripts running some core functions. I discovered this, when there was a problem that I had to deep dive into. I a recommendation to change to a hard-coded variable. The answer was "it will take two weeks". Why? Because no one knew what it will do or could read Perl. It was a 30 second job, including sdlc. Think xkcd Dependency https://xkcd.com/2347/ )

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

#40

Post by snovymgodym »

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 than many other things which are younger than it.

But this shouldn't really be taken as a positive point for COBOL or the mainframe ecosystem. It's simply a fact of life that organizations tend to stick with the first thing that works, and for the types of entities involved in the first wave of digitalization (e.g. governments, banks, airlines) that was usually an IBM mainframe along with the software that runs on it.

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