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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

#341

Post by cmiles74 »

unscaled wrote: post #231
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…

4GL were supposed to be even more of that, with more "human-language-like" constructs added to the language to deal with things besides general logic, simple data structures and arithmetic. The author mentions "4GLs" were all the rage in the early 1990s, but I doubt that that was true outside of the mainframe world. The 4GL movement, as a conscious movement, seems to have always been highly mainframe oriented (the Wi…

I have to disagree that 4GL languages being aimed at the big iron, mainframe world. After browsing the Wikipedia page, there seems to be some confusion around what a 4GL would actually be... For instance, RPG is lumped into this category despite it functioning at a pretty low level and predating the idea by about 30 years. When I first started working with RPG we had worksheets from IBM that felt reminiscent of punch cards.

In my experience, most 4GL languages were aimed at microcomputers and did reasonably well. Others have mention FoxPro and dBase, 4D and FileMaker also slot nicely into this category. IMHO, they had great success in the back office of small businesses.

I have seen some effort to force SQL into this category, perhaps with the idea that a SQL database with stored procedures technically meets the 4GL definition.

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

#342

Post by palisade »

palisade wrote: post #312

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…

Forgot to mention the post office. And, there are probably many more.

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

#343

Post by mannykannot »

immibis wrote: post #307
froh wrote: post #244

Earlier 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…

In fact we've been using programming LLMs for a long time, which we call compilers.

The acronym LLM stands for what is now a term of art for a class of information- processing systems which are produced by, and themselves produce their output by, methods very unlike those for compilers. This is just as well, considering the consequences that would follow from compilers routinely hallucinating.

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

#344

Post by bitwize »

I find it fascinating that the recommended environment for IBM mainframe COBOL development is... Visual Studio Code. IBM makes a plugin that lets you remotely edit COBOL code on the mainframe in your editor.

Guess COBOL is alive enough to warrant this kind of support.

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

#345

Post by nerdponx »

vishnugupta wrote: post #249
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…

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 some ways similar to analysts/data folks using SQL to communicate with databases.

But SQL has the exact same problem. Except for very trivial scenarios, you can't just be an expert and plop your expertise into a SQL query. You have to learn how to use SQL to use SQL.

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

#346

Post by electroly »

palisade wrote: post #158
erik_seaberg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.2?topic=statement-ex... seems to be demonstrating a language that is not memory-safe (maybe it used to be, but how?) COMPUTE SIZE-NEEDED = LENGTH OF OBJ + LENGTH OF VARTAB * NUM-ELEMENTS ALLOCATE SIZE-NEEDED CHARACTERS INITIALIZED RETURNING VPTR SET ADDRESS OF VARGRP TO VPTR MOVE NUM-ELEMENTS TO OBJ MOVE BUFFER(1:SIZE-NEEDED) TO VARGRP SET VPTR TO ADDRESS OF BUFFER FREE…

The compiler would have rejected that, if I remember correctly. I'm not in the field of cobol myself, I learned it briefly in college ages ago.

Which part do you think would be rejected? This code is an example from the z/OS COBOL documentation--I'm quite sure it works.

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

#347

Post by coldpie »

palisade wrote: post #312

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…

This sounds interesting, but I wonder who this message needs to be directed to? As a dev who doesn't work there, I can't just go "fix 2038 for the post office." Are you encouraging devs like me to go try to get themselves hired into these positions now, and advocate allocating resources to fix these problems? Are you trying to tell the higher-ups at these places about a problem they might not know about?

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

#348

Post by zknow »

chii wrote: post #325
dcminter wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a spec doc from a domain expert that said something like: "The transaction consists of a credit stub and a debit stub. If the debit stub is missing and is of type X then we do A and if it is of type Y then we do B." How to know what flavour the missing item was? Absolutely no mention of that...

It's interesting that domain experts all exhibit the same cognitive issue - their assumptions are just so ingrained that they cannot articulate it at all. The fact that they "know" a missing stub would have a type is because they actually have some more information than they let on, and this information is only known by the expert. For example, they know if the submission was from party A, it must be type X. But that…

you might say the domain expert expects the coputer to also already be a domain expert

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

#349

Post by noisy_boy »

tephra wrote: post #315
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.

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..).

I would love to do that for a living assuming it has job security, no crazy obsession with "velocity" and sane working hours.

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

#350

Post by zknow »

NoGravitas wrote: post #326
rbanffy wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like cyberpunk was realized without the vivid imagery and neon lights :( The 21st century never ceases to disappoint. It’s a cheap, low budget and dystopian version of what we imagined.

To be fair, what we imagined was dystopian, too. It's just that some people with a lot of ambition and not much media literacy didn't realize it was dystopian, and set about to build that future.

could have been high budget dystopian at least!
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