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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

#311

Post by imgabe »

kwanbix wrote: post #309
lefessan wrote: post #308

COBOL is not dead, but it's difficult to get access to, because there is almost no open-source tooling around it for Linux. We (OCamlPro) have created a project, called SuperBOL, to create an open-source environment around the GnuCOBOL open-source compiler (that is now very mature and used by companies). We have already released the VScode extension with an LSP for COBOL to get a modern IDE, and we are working on oth…

The problem is not so much access to tooling, but access to mainframes. I can learn COBOL in a day or two, and I would love to work on a "boring" COBOL job, but I have no experience with mainframes.

Is there anything particularly different about mainframes compared to working on a server besides it probably being a different operating system? I assume it has a command line and you ssh into it somehow (or something similar)? Or are they still running punch cards or something?

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

#312

Post by palisade »

Oh, btw, COBOL has the 2038 problem and it is right around the corner. We're going to need A LOT of new COBOL engineers to fix it. It runs so much of our world. We managed to save the world from Y2K in the nick of time. But, I'm not sure if we're going to have the minds necessary to solve 2038 by then as the can has just been kicked down the road without consideration. If anyone is worried there won't be jobs, there WILL be jobs.

Not to be too macabre, but we need to transfer the knowledge while the people who have it are still alive, can remember and can teach others to pick up the torch. And, let us call it was it is, of those remain and still have the desire to make the effort to transfer that knowledge.

It is easy to look back on y2k and think well that wasn't a big deal, but the only reason it wasn't is because people tirelessly worked to stop it. It is a testament to their success.

Regarding y2k Robert Bemer tried to warn people in 1971, with 29 years left to go. And, Peter de Jager published his attention-getting article "Doomsday 2000," in 1993 (in Computerworld), with a mere 7 years left which finally put the fire under everyone's ass. Keep in mind, there were still many original COBOL programmers and mainframe experts left to talk to at that time. And, there was a lot less code to change back then than there is now.

Voting tabulation, insurance, utilities, administrative systems, banking, ATMs, travel, healthcare, social security, point of sale, IRS, pension funds, TACTICAL NUKES, hotel bookings and payroll programs. More than 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. For better or worse, it is the very bedrock of our modern society.

If you want to replace it with something that you want to maintain instead, that's fine too but we're running out of time.

"Danger, Will Robinson! DANGER!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU

"Listen the nothing will be here any minute. I will just sit here and let it take me away too. They look... like... big... strong hands.... Don't they?" https://youtu.be/symP4QT7wLU?feature=shared&t=24

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

#313

Post by julian_t »

imgabe wrote: post #311
kwanbix wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not so much access to tooling, but access to mainframes. I can learn COBOL in a day or two, and I would love to work on a "boring" COBOL job, but I have no experience with mainframes.

Is there anything particularly different about mainframes compared to working on a server besides it probably being a different operating system? I assume it has a command line and you ssh into it somehow (or something similar)? Or are they still running punch cards or something?

It's a very different (and foreign) environment. Job control language, how data is stored... if you come from a typical modern server environment you'd be pretty lost in the mainframe world.

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

#314

Post by crackez »

mathgorges wrote: post #180
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.

This is fascinating to me as an ex-mainframer that now works on a niche hyperscaler. I would love to learn more! Will you let me know some of the names in the space so that I can research more? Some cursory searching only brings up some questionably relavent press releases from IBM.

Look up Micro Focus Enterprise Server and Enterprise Developer. They are now owned by Rocket.

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

#315

Post by tephra »

kwanbix wrote: post #309
lefessan wrote: post #308

COBOL is not dead, but it's difficult to get access to, because there is almost no open-source tooling around it for Linux. We (OCamlPro) have created a project, called SuperBOL, to create an open-source environment around the GnuCOBOL open-source compiler (that is now very mature and used by companies). We have already released the VScode extension with an LSP for COBOL to get a modern IDE, and we are working on oth…

The problem is not so much access to tooling, but access to mainframes. I can learn COBOL in a day or two, and I would love to work on a "boring" COBOL job, but I have no experience with mainframes.

I know two people that spend some of their time writing COBOL for a major bank. They do find that part of the job pretty boring, it is basically just writing down SQL queries in a COBOL file and then trying to get passed their 50 year old development workflow (merge to master, then do testing in a testing environment, then get code review..).

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

#316

Post by pantalaimon »

lefessan wrote: post #308

COBOL is not dead, but it's difficult to get access to, because there is almost no open-source tooling around it for Linux. We (OCamlPro) have created a project, called SuperBOL, to create an open-source environment around the GnuCOBOL open-source compiler (that is now very mature and used by companies). We have already released the VScode extension with an LSP for COBOL to get a modern IDE, and we are working on oth…

What about

https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/

https://cobolworx.com/pages/cobforgcc.html

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

#317

Post by pdw »

eslaught wrote: post #183
tombert wrote: post #30

You 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…

I wrote a small program in Algol 68 once. It was horrible because it didn't even have heap allocation in the language, so things you'd think of doing in C (e.g., tree data structures) just didn't work. That and all the compiler errors were pure numerical codes which you had to go look up in the manual (not provided). And forget about getting line numbers. I am very much glad I wasn't alive at the time this was the st…

You're probably thinking of Algol 60? Algol 68 definitely had heap operations, the sample code on Wikipedia even showcases them to build linked lists.

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

#319

Post by anthk »

namaria wrote: post #299
rbanffy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Z Machine text adventures are far more predictable...

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

#320

Post by anthk »

rightbyte wrote: post #283
enriquto wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are good programs written in Perl. PangZero, Synaptic, most of Debian config tools...
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