So is it worth learning COBOL for someone just looking to make money or not? I've heard people say yes, you can make a lot of money being the code monkey to fix the governments' software, and no, learning COBOL will not be enough (you need specific insight to whatever you're fixing as well).
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
431–440 of 448 posts
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You say that like it's something completely different, but XNU is a BSD, with a lot of code inherited from FreeBSD in particular.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The parent is almost certainly aware macOS is BSD-based Doubtful. Surely they would know macOS is XNU-based?
You say that like it's something completely different, but XNU is a BSD, with a lot of code inherited from FreeBSD in particular.
The "higher" levels of XNU are largely inherited from the BSD legacy, but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base. So even if you take an inheritance angle, XNU is based on Mach, not BSD. macOS is full of BSD/derivatives code, sure, but it is not based on them. The foundation is laid elsewhere.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#434You 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…
Cobol is still there not because of cobol itself, but because of vendor and platform lock-in. And I guess having monolithic codebase/platform. it’s not even esoteric and difficult, just a lot of it without much structure visible to you.
COBOL is still running where it’s running because those old applications 1) work and 2) are very expensive to rewrite. Unimportant programs were abandoned. Simple one were migrated to Java decades ago. The useful-and-complicated — and often badly designed — are what remain.
If you’re a bank, you run COBOL. Estimates are 95% of ATM transactions go through a COBOL program.
But it doesn’t have to run on a mainframe! We’re adding COBOL to the GNU Compiler Collection. www.cobolworx.com.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that like it's something completely different, but XNU is a BSD, with a lot of code inherited from FreeBSD in particular.
The "higher" levels of XNU are largely inherited from the BSD legacy, but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base. So even if you take an inheritance angle, XNU is based on Mach, not BSD. macOS is full of BSD/derivatives code, sure, but it is not based on them. The foundation is laid elsewhere.
> but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base
No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion so you could say other people are wrong?
This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "higher" levels of XNU are largely inherited from the BSD legacy, but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base. So even if you take an inheritance angle, XNU is based on Mach, not BSD. macOS is full of BSD/derivatives code, sure, but it is not based on them. The foundation is laid elsewhere.
> but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion so you could say other people are wrong? This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion
The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
Regardless, what you may have missed is the additional context the followed: "not Linux". The parallel to Linux in macOS is XNU. Therefore, if other systems are Linux-based as we are to infer from the original comment, then macOS is XNU-based, not BSD-based. Yes, XNU contains some BSD code, but it is not BSD. It is very much its own distinct kernel maintained independently of BSD-adjacent organizations.
> This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
It could advance someone's understanding if they were open to seeing their understanding advance. I understand not everyone is accepting of new ideas and that many fear learning something new.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but we're clearly talking about what serves as the base No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion so you could say other people are wrong? This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based? Regardless, what you may hav…
> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://git@github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu.gi repo that still have FreeBSD CVS version tags on them for some reason.
There is no curl code in the kernel. (If you want to be truly pedantic, and I see that you do, there is one shell script in that repo that assumes curl is installed.)
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based? Regardless, what you may hav…
> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based? A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://git@github.co…
> A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD
Sure, just as we already discussed at the very beginning of our exchange. Glad you able to learn something from our discussion, even if it has taken you an astoundingly long to time to get there. Here I was starting to think you were one of those who reject learning. I am happy to learn that you're just slow.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
> Adoption takes time, for sure, especially when dealing with fixed assets like a factory. I was talking about the need to re-imagine and re-organise how factories work, not about the physical factories themselves. So it's more like a 'software' problem. > Does anyone here see GenAI teams being spun up for "management" by a human? Or do we see fancy Google search / code completion? How would the two cases look differ…
What I'm picturing is two divergent paths with very different impacts on human interaction.
1) Every human programmer becomes the surgeon in Fred Brooks's surgical team model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_sur...) and AI provides the rest. In effect, all working human programmers are software architects in the sense that they exist in large companies. The unstated assumption here is that going from vague user input to a solution is roughly equivalent to AGI, and so is further out than anything on the immediate horizon.
2) GenAI is used as a sort of advanced template/snippet/autocomplete system.
The first one is a fundamental paradigm shift. Professional programmers don't cease to exist, but the profession becomes inherently smaller and more elite. The bar is higher and there isn't room for many perfectly intelligent people who work in the field today.
The second one is a force multiplier and is helpful, but is also a much more banal economic question, namely whether the tool generates enough value to justify the cost.
I have no complaint either way and I'm definitely interested in the next step beyond what we've seen so far. The hype implies that the first branch above is where everything is headed, hence the "death of programming as a profession" type articles that seem to be making the rounds, but that isn't what I've seen day-to-day, which is what prompted the original thought.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based? A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://git@github.co…
> A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD Sure, just as we already discussed at the very beginning of our exchange. Glad you able to learn something from our discussion, even if it has taken you an astoundingly long to time to get there. Here I was starting to think you were one of those who reject learning. I am happy to learn that you're just slow.
I've learned you are rude and presumptive. I was previously aware of the provenance of macOS's kernel.