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

#401

Post by randomdata » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 6:04 PM UTC

discretion22 wrote: post #371

eru wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO, the best way to do it is to be sitting with the expert, and observe exactly what they do. Or you give them a prototype of the program, and see what they complain about?

My experience is that invariably results in "development by veto". Each prototype they say that's not what I want, give me something else (that I'll fail to describe just like the last time) and I'll tell you that is wrong too after you've worked on it for a few weeks. Occasionally, you'll randomly get something they accept - but only for a few weeks until they come across some missing capability for some other thing…

You still have to actually listen to the complaints. "That's not what I want" does not mean try again, it means they have no interest in what you are trying to offer in even the most basic sense. The lesson from that type of complaint is that you are barking up the wrong tree. Time to move on to something else.

When you are solving a real problem, you will still receive complaints, but they will be much more constructive.

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

#402

Post by randomdata » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 6:29 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #393

nerdponx wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You have to learn how to use SQL to use SQL. As with any other tool one has to learn it to effectively use it. Some find the learning curve not worth it and stick with Excel which is OK. But the thing is even Excel has to be learned to make full use of its potential.

Keep in mind that the context is around domain experts being able to transcribe their domain knowledge into a machine-understandable language without concern for the intricacies of the machine it is executed on. That is where COBOL and SQL are said to have failed to live up to the hype, of which I'd agree. SQL is not a particularly good abstraction. Even for relatively trivial tasks, you still need to understand how computers work. EXPLAIN is the bread and butter of SQL users.

Ultimately every abstraction is leaky. There will never be a solution where you never need to understand how computers work under all circumstances. But my impression is that you can go a lot further in Excel before the stuff going on behind the scenes starts to get in your way? From what I have seen, Excel itself is more likely to get in your way before not knowing how computers work does.

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

#403

Post by cies » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 6:42 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #51

Is PERL dead yet?

I asked ChatGPT -- Please estimate the popularity of these languages, relative to the most popular one (that gets 100%). Base your answer on community activity on different platforms (stackoverflow, reddit, hacker news, dev.to, github) and the number of books available and sold: COBOL, Perl, PHP, BASIC, TCL, ColdFusion.

Estimated popularity:

    PHP: 100% (reference)
    Perl: 30%
    COBOL: 25%
    BASIC: 10%
    TCL: 8%
    ColdFusion: 5%

(I consider all of these dead, or, "in maintenance mode")

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

#404

Post by kwanbix » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 6:44 PM UTC

lefessan wrote: post #329

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.

The goal of SuperBOL ( https://superbol.eu ) is to allow companies to migrate from mainframes to Linux workstations, to get a "modern" experience of development and deployment. Indeed, mainframes are hard to get access to, and require a training by themselves, I have worked on Linux and Windows for years, and development on a Mainframe has nothing in common :-) I think the problem of COBOL is not only the lack of COB…

I imagine 99% of the work is to be done on "obsolete" mainframes as you call them. I doubt there is much new development in COBOL in 2024.

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

#405

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

scottlamb wrote: post #218

mozman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is BSD based - not Linux.

Apple is a company, not an operating system. The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based and is suggesting Apple also uses Linux in e.g. cloud deployments. They are of course correct.

[deleted]

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

#406

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:20 PM UTC

mozman wrote: post #214

worthless-trash wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My money is that they started these projects before swift was available on linux. I have no evidence to say that apple use Linux, but businesses gotta business so isnt a big bet to make.

Apple is BSD based - not Linux.

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by consteval » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #189

Muromec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah not really. People just started replacing COBOL with java and employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. It can also be upgraded in smaller chunks and finding enough developers for the tool is an important metric corporate is looking at. If anything, banks are actively optimizing for developer experience to make sure 60% of new hires don’t run away in the first year. If…

> employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. Well I hope they’re wise enough to not let any good employment attorneys catch wind because that’s blatantly illegal.

The problem with such laws is it's trivial to avoid. Do they look old? I mean, you can't presume someone is thinking about age when they choose not to hire someone, but they definitely could be.

Discrimination is an almost "thought crime", meaning you can commit it entirely in your head. But the outcome is real. So it's very tough to spot, particularly when said discrimination also aligns with the most common societal biases.

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

#408

Post by layer8 » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

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.

The problem is that Bash also isn’t really great for admin scripts.

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

#409

Post by layer8 » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

Mc91 wrote: post #49

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 program an Android app for a Fortune 100 company. Last commit where someone edited a Java file was last week. Most of the new code from the past few years has been in Kotlin though.

That’s because it’s Android.

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

#410

Post by randomdata » Wed, Oct 02, 2024, 7:39 PM UTC

scottlamb wrote: post #218

mozman wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is BSD based - not Linux.

Apple is a company, not an operating system. The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based and is suggesting Apple also uses Linux in e.g. cloud deployments. They are of course correct.

> The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based

Doubtful. Surely they would know macOS is XNU-based?