COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by overtomanu » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

Similar thing applies to SAP ABAP. It is like Java from a parallel world, where the accumulated cruft for maintaining backward compatibility is 3-4 times more than Java. It also like a low code/no code environment where the language, the UI, ABAP IDE etc is tightly coupled to one another. Like Java, it has continued to add more language features with time, but the legacy code using old constructs is still there in the codebase of many of the orgs.

Initially and up to some extent still now, it is verbose and wording wise, very similar to COBOL, then somewhere I guess in the late 90s, OO paradigm wave came in, and it had "OO ABAP" with classes and methods. Now cloud wave is influencing it and ABAP now has a new cloud flavor "ABAP for cloud" where most of the old constructs are not supported.

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

#382

Post by pnw » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

My first job was programming an ancient COBOL system in a government agency riddled with outdated tech.

The only real upside was, COBOL is so wordy, it forced me to improve my typing speed!

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

#383

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:04 PM UTC

yourapostasy wrote: post #195

mathgorges wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like they’re talking about running IBM Wazi on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. As far as I know, there isn’t a System z-on-a-container offering, like you install from a Helm Chart or comes to you from an OCI registry. If it is the IBM I know, it’s completely out of reach of most homelab’ers and hobbyists. IBM Wazi As A Service is supposed to be more affordable than the self hosted version and the Z Developme…

[deleted]

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

#384

Post by palisade » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

electroly wrote: post #346

palisade wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The heap stuff is new I guess, we didn't have that back when I was writing programs in it. So, yea, not so safe anymore. :D I take back what I said about it being safer then. I can't go back and edit my original post, it's been too long.

The compiler did normally warn for data bounds checking, so I figured it would in this case. If that's not the case anymore then I'm wrong.

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

#385

Post by zifpanachr23 » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #344

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.

Works for Assembly and JCL and REXX as well, and if you don't mind turning off some of your local LSP support like header resolution and the like, also C/C++ and Java and Shell.

The old guard mostly still prefers ISPF though cause they've become really fast in it not unlike a Unix greybeard is gonna prefer something like vim.

I'm sorta torn on it. I like using the 3270 environment cause I can get around to different places a little easier than via vscode, but if I'm editing a lot of large files, it's nice to be able to see more code at once and have them open in multiple side by side tabs. You can do that in ISPF, but it's a little more unwieldy and you have less dynamic control over font size.

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

#386

Post by danielmarkbruce » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

crackez wrote: post #314

mathgorges wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I second this and know some of the folks who work on Enterprise Server. Good people. They have a partnership of some sort with AWS and there is a bunch of decent docs around Enterprise Server on AWS

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

#387

Post by rqtwteye » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:16 PM UTC

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…

"is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems?"

I don't think so. But it's pretty much guaranteed that a lot of the people who are complaining about COBOL today are writing systems that will be legacy in 30 years. And the generation of programmers then will be complaining about today's programmers.

Especially when I look at node or python with tons of external packages (.NET going the same way), I don't see a good long term future.

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

#388

Post by xiande04 » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

I read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll (highly recommend btw) published in 1989. I laughed out loud when he described Cobol as an antiquated language that no one wanted to support. In 1989.

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

#389

Post by mmcdermott » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #360

mmcdermott wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a disconnect somewhere. When I read online, I hear about how GenAI/LLMs replace programmers and office workers. When I go to work, I mostly hear the question of how we can apply GenAI/LLMs, apart from discussion of the general buzz. Maybe this is a reflection of local conditions, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like the truly revolutionary changes require the solution to find a problem. It was immediately…

Electricity famously took perhaps twenty years for people to slowly figure out how to re-organise factories around it.. Hence the delayed impact on productivity figures. To elaborate: in the bad old days of you had one big engine, eg a steam engine, that was driving shafts and belts all around the factory. There was a lot of friction, and this was dangerous. So you had to carefully design your factory around these co…

Adoption takes time, for sure, especially when dealing with fixed assets like a factory. The difference I'm poking at is that electricity had a clear value proposition and improved over time. I see people looking for the value proposition in GenAI/LLMs, which brings me to the original question.

If GenAI now was like early electricity, we would know what we wanted to use it for, even if we weren't there yet. That isn't what it looks like to me, but I'd be curious to know if that's just where I'm sitting, metaphorically speaking.

Every company I have worked for had more work than hands for programming and other knowledge work. Capacity is valuable. Does anyone here see GenAI teams being spun up for "management" by a human? Or do we see fancy Google search / code completion?

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

#390

Post by zifpanachr23 » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 5:21 PM UTC

snovymgodym wrote: post #40

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 tha…

If by new business we literally mean startups, then that has been the case basically forever, even back in the 60s and 70s. Mainframes were never really for new businesses in the startup sense of the word. The barrier to entry has always been kind of extreme. So the big customers even back in the day were always old insurance companies and banks and governments etc. It wasn't really until minicomputers that "new businesses" doing computing at all was feasible.

So in that sense, not much has really changed, and for the target market of the product, I don't think it makes sense as a good metric for whether the platform is dead or alive.