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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

#331

Post by _yb2s »

thorin wrote: post #289
_yb2s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

That was exactly my point

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

#332

Post by macintux »

julian_t wrote: post #313
imgabe wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 1996 I took a TCP class in Chicago for which it turned out I was overqualified; it was mainly how to use tools like telnet and FTP.

But what I remember most: the two other students were mainframe programmers, and they were just as baffled by my world as I was by theirs. It really was an entirely different computing paradigm, although 30 years later I probably have enough experience to make more connections than I could then.

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

#333

Post by masto »

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 feel like APL is worth the experience, because it's such a different paradigm.

I've got a soft spot for it as well because I actually used it. At work. On a PC. In the 90s. My assignment was to figure out how to get data into it, for which I ended up writing a routine that operated on floating point numbers as vectors of 1s and 0s and swapped the bits around to convert from Microsoft to IEEE format. While wearing an onion on my belt, of course.

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

#334

Post by eddieroger »

I'm very late to this post, so I'm sure this will get lost, but in case OP sees it, I'm very sorry for the loss of your grandparents, and hope that you found some joy and comfort in writing about your grandfather fondly in this article, and he has found peace after the loss of your grandmother.

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

#336

Post by hardburn »

eddieroger wrote: post #334

I'm very late to this post, so I'm sure this will get lost, but in case OP sees it, I'm very sorry for the loss of your grandparents, and hope that you found some joy and comfort in writing about your grandfather fondly in this article, and he has found peace after the loss of your grandmother.

Thank you!

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

#337

Post by skipkey »

kevindamm wrote: post #232
xarope wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

time to brush up my perl. Requires some zen'ess and flow time to grok the #@[]{} again...

It's been over a decade for me but I remember the # for tables and @ for arrays not being that hard to decipher, it was the "where is this $_ referring to at this point?" kind of puzzles that would stump me, especially when pattern matching application implicitly uses it too.

A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.

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

#338

Post by adamc »

froh wrote: post #244
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…

> 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…

Not to mention someone would need to evaluate and test the proposed solution... which with today's LLMs I would not bet heavily on its correctness.

This is some years ago, but a friend of mine, trained in a 4GL that was still a procedural programming language, went somewhere that was using a higher level, model-based generation of code based on that language. It turned out they still needed a few people who understood how things worked beneath the hood.

I am deeply skeptical that human-language level specifications will ever capture all the things that really need to be said for programming, any more than they do for mathematics. There are reasons for formalisms. English is slippery.

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

#340

Post by adamc »

El_RIDO wrote: post #327
farrelle25 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gosh it's a long time since I heard 'Clipper' mentioned. I used to do 'PC' apps for Banks in the early 90s. Turbo Pascal and Clipper were popular with us. (We used PL/1 rather than COBOL for batch processing) Then VB 4.0 started to get popular around 1996 and ruled the roost... So many technologies... does anyone remember 'SUPRA' from that era! (think it was supposed to be a 4GL language/interface for mainframe datab…

Sigh I work at a company that not long ago added support for applications written to use SUPRA to their portfolio. It's not dead yet, there are companies out there still running it in production and willing to spend money to replace it, while keeping their business logic.

Where I work we still use Software AG's Natural for mainframe programming. It's not really a bad language for what it is (very much focused on database programming). The main limitation is that they never created or provided great mechanisms for something like a standard library, so we do a lot in Python now, and occasionally other languages.

From my perspective, the standard libraries of languages like Python and Java, as well as effective package managers such as pip or npm or cargo, have raised the bar so high that it is difficult for old, specialist languages to compete in most cases. Although the security problems of the package managers give me some pause.

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