Is PERL dead yet?
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
51–60 of 448 posts
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#52You 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…
Fortran is not a legacy language.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#53For 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.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#54You 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.
This is what people miss about COBOL. It's not like people are compiling COBOL and running it on Linux on an x86 box. They are running it on legacy operating systems (and hardware) which provide a different set of underlying services. It's a whole different planet.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#55You 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…
>but is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems? It feels like we're getting into that space already.
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 anything, banks are better at navigating those kind of structural risks, they were just slow on undertaking such risks exist.
If you have an episode of existential anxiety because of dat AI eating mijn job, getting a union job in a bank is a way to hedge this particular risk.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#56COBOL is dead, long live COBOL.
For any cobol devs here, we at https://cobolcopilot.com would love to hear from you
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#57You 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.
This. Nobody wants to have the COBOL problem again, so the developer hiring money follows the programming language popularity market (with a certain regulatory approved laf ofc)
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody writes MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ON SIZE ERROR STOP RUN. any more.
I mean, if you squint your eyes a bit, that could be SQL! So even if it's not COBOL, there's people out there writing in a vaguely english business programming language.
So you spotted that? I have no proof or links to share, but I've always thought SQL was inspired by, or at least made to not look out of place next to COBOL. I recall COBOL coding card layout interpreted a flag on punch cards at the char column where top-level picture clauses needed to start specifically for designating a line as SQL for static embedded SQL preprocessing.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like every time COBOL is mentioned we get these stories about crazy high comp for COBOL developers, but anecdotally my aunt worked on COBOL projects in the mid 2010s and was paid a much more modest 45 $/hr. Good money for small town middle America where she lives, but nowhere close to what a decent JS dev can get.
Similar experience with a friend of mine. I feel like these high salaries only apply to people who habe worked at one of these companies for a looong time.
High salaries are relative. $90k is a high salary for most people in the world, even for tech workers outside of Silicon Valley.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#60Started my career doing Y2K stuff in 1998 and I still touch COBOL here and there today. I have a 10,000 line CICS program that runs every 30 seconds that I wrote in 2010. It has never failed since.
That's what I liked about developing Oracle stored procedures activated by cron jobs. Ran for 5 years, no maintenance needed.
That seems like a low barrier of expectations. I can think of several DB's that would run exactly like that.