I just left a major UK retail bank where I was managing the remediation of their debit card authorisation system that was written in COBOL.
What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#42A friend of mine used to work at PG&E in San Francisco. He told me that there is an ancient server in the basement running COBOL code that no one quite understood, upon which was a hand lettered note to never touch that machine for any reason, ever.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#43I have a friend who is a physics major, one of the primary reasons he was learning to program was to use MPI & OpenMP languages, and presuming fortan has a very high performance / robust compiler for using MPI, this would probably be the soul reason it's used for large super computer & cluster computations because it's designed for distributed computation. I think this guy has the best answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2266643/for-what-are-fort...
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#44As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine). -- Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information: * 75% of the world's business data passes throug…
>Older programmers are sometimes being enticed out of retirement to maintain legacy systems (this is rather hit or miss as there appears to still be some age discrimination here).
Dear Lord. The one area where age discrimination should rationally favor older programmers and they still get the shaft. How does that conversation go in HR?
"Here's a candidate who knows COBOL... but wait, he's over 60. Ewww, it's so depressing looking at old people [i.e., those over 30] who aren't management track. And we'd have to pay him good money to do something that isn't focused on giving orders to underlings. How yucky. Welp, guess that mission critical piece of software can wait."
Perhaps I've been channeling Michael O. Church a bit too much for my own good, but sometimes it looks as though he's nailed it.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#45Where is the Pascal love? Is it dead and buried at this point? I threw out the box to Turbo Pascal only a decade ago.
Compared to Cobol and Fortran, Pascal always was a blip on the radar. Some success as a teaching tool (UCSD etc.), then DOS (Turbo) and Windows (Delphi) programming. Small niches, not that much of legacy code (especially if you can keep the database and just e.g. exchange the Delphi frontend with an ASP.NET one).
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#46I ran into someone who worked at the IT department at Mass Gen Radonc, and they use Fortran for the software delivering the radiation doses.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#47I ran into someone who worked at the IT department at Mass Gen Radonc, and they use Fortran for the software delivering the radiation doses.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#48Where is the Pascal love? Is it dead and buried at this point? I threw out the box to Turbo Pascal only a decade ago.
I used to be a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP), and Delphi was popular among small shops making Windows desktop applications. I never was a Delphi programmer, but it's adherents loved that it produced fast code with a small footprint. It combined a RAD environment let developers easily do low level coding when needed. When VB6 was canned by Microsoft, I think Delphi had an opening that they could have taken advantage of, but the various owners (Borland, Embarcadero) have always seemed to mis-manage the product. The latest Delphi has multi-platform support, but the pricing is still too high to get wide spread traction in my opinion.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that for years made Fortran stand out is that the language explicitly assumes all arrays passed in to a subprogram have no overlaps. Thus a Fortran compiler doesn't have to do anything special to make sure it preserves order when storing and accessing from two different arrays. Therefore the compiler can be much more aggressive about unrolling loops and changing the order of operations. By contrast, given a…
One thing that for years made Fortran stand out is that the language explicitly assumes all arrays passed in to a subprogram have no overlaps. There's a HUGE number of languages that don't allow aliasing in this way. I wasn't thinking about "how to improve C", I had APL, J, K, Q etc. in mind, as well as languages that implement mass array processing with similar semantics in terms of a more conventional syntax.
Fundamentally I agree with you. In my original comment, I was just trying to give a historical view of why people took the view that "optimizing Fortran compilers are hard to beat," rather than to defend it.
Personally, I think that idea is hard to justify these days, especially when, in my experience, finding 20-30% speed differences between optimizing Fortran compilers isn't all that hard.
Re: What are Fortran and Cobol used for today?
#50As an ex-COBOL programmer, I did some research in this area and I uncovered the following (from a 2009 blog post of mine). -- Do a little research into COBOL and a few interesting things jump out at you. Some of this information is from Gartner Group and the rest can easily be verified by doing even a brief survey of the field. Taking the following bits of information: * 75% of the world's business data passes throug…
"The industry is struggling to find new COBOL programmers because few young programmers love the thought of maintaining decades-old enterprise systems where all data is global and GOTO is often the first choice in flow control."
A significant percentage of Freshers joining Indian it services companies like Infosys,tcs etc (who maintain such legacy systems) are trained in COBOL.