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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

#441

Post by antonvs »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #265
vishnugupta wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> COBOL and 4GLs in general COBOL dates back to 1959, much earlier than 4GLs, and the cited 1992/1999 articles make the point that 4GLs were poised to replace the likes of COBOL and FORTRAN when in fact those dinosaurs, or rather nautili since still living, turned out to outlive 4GLs except SQL (when counted as 4GL).

Arguably, Python is what 4GLs turned into or were supplanted by.

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

#442

Post by randomdata »

scottlamb wrote: post #440
randomdata wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Rude and presumptive are traits only of humans. How did you mistake software as being human?

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

#443

Post by AdieuToLogic »

_yb2s wrote: post #374
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This blows my mind, since it seems like a fairly low level/terse language compared to more modern domain specific languages. I have heard others and myself describe COBOL in many ways, most involving creative expletive phraseology which would make a sailor blush, but "low level/terse language" is a new one to me. > But in some sense they were dead right... since (I assume) that what "programming" meant at the time…

> LISP and Fortran predate COBOL IIRC I didn't mean to imply COBOL was anything close to the first programming language, only that I was speculating what 'programming' generally meant within computer culture at the time. I was not around at that time- but I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s, whereas it is far less common nowadays.…

> ... I strongly suspect that directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s ...

It depends on what type of programming was being done. What we now call "kernels" and "device drivers" were largely authored in assembly languages well into the 80's (depending on the machine).

> I wonder what year Fortran overtook assembly and became the most popular programming language during that era?

Fortran got its name from "formula translator" (or equivalent, depending the source), so it quickly gained traction in the scientific/mathematics domain. As an aside, there are variants of BASIC which have much of the semantic mathematical capabilities of Fortran yet with better I/O support IMHO. None come close in performance AFAIK.

> I suspect it was well after COBOL came out.

COBOL took off in the business world, as it was intended to do, and remains prevalent in at least the insurance and banking industries to this day.

> ... I was able to find that C was released in 1972, but took until 1982 to overtake Fortran, and until 1985 to overtake Pascal.

K&R C was viewed by many as "portable assembly code", with Unix helping it to gain acceptance. ANSII C largely replaced use of K&R C in the late 80's.

Depending on the OS, a small amount of "shim code" remained in assembly (such as interrupt handlers and MMU interaction) up to most of the OS being written in assembly well into the late 80's.

This is all to say that:

> ... directly writing machine code and/or assembly was still common practice throughout the entire 1950s

Is still common practice in OS development, albeit to a lesser degree, if directly writing machine code is omitted.

HTH

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

#444

Post by cwbriscoe »

p_l wrote: post #82
_w1tm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.

They are patched up regularly. The COBOL code itself maybe not, but the runtimes?

You are correct, the OS is patched regularly but that doesn't require a recompile for the COBOL code, the OS ABI is stable and unchanging for legacy code. I have programs still running that hasn't been recompiled since 2005 (maybe earlier that is just what I noticed recently). When they upgrade hardware, they can do it per LPAR. They just shift the workloads over to other LPARS while they are upgrading another. Pretty much zero downtime.

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

#445

Post by cwbriscoe »

ang_cire wrote: post #42
_w1tm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.

They absolutely are. Modern COBOL (even 25 year old COBOL) isn't running on ancient System360/370/390s or something, it's running on modern z/OS mainframes.

Yup, Z/OS even has an AIX subsystem these days. I have had to use it for some java decryption software and to use it to do some ebcdic to ascii conversion.

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

#446

Post by cwbriscoe »

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's were a mistake. We have 4gl code that was compiled into COBOL. Nice. Except, nobody still around knows the 4gl language and the generated COBOL is completely unreadable.

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

#447

Post by p_l »

cwbriscoe wrote: post #444
p_l wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are patched up regularly. The COBOL code itself maybe not, but the runtimes?

You are correct, the OS is patched regularly but that doesn't require a recompile for the COBOL code, the OS ABI is stable and unchanging for legacy code. I have programs still running that hasn't been recompiled since 2005 (maybe earlier that is just what I noticed recently). When they upgrade hardware, they can do it per LPAR. They just shift the workloads over to other LPARS while they are upgrading another. Prett…

Yep. CICS, IMS, etc. all get updates along with z/OS itself, yet I had once plugged in an user exit written and compiled before 64bit z/OS existed and it just worked.

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

#448

Post by jklowden »

brightball wrote: post #53

For what it's worth, I'm still actively looking for a COBOL speaker for the 2025 Carolina Code Conference. Been wanting to get a COBOL talk for a while, especially with GnuCOBOL's recent update. https://gnucobol.sourceforge.io/ https://carolina.codes

www.cobolworx.com. Always on the lookout for places to talk about our work.
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