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

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 become a programmer.

The main lesson of COBOL is that it isn't the computer interface/language that necessitates a programmer.

It is very much broken and said institutions don’t like it

> A rewrite or a replatform is very, very hard and risky as a result; the system is now defined by how the mainframe runs the processes, to a very large degree.

And that's why so many neo-banks/fintechs are eating the lunch of the established banks left and right, same for insurance. The "old guard" is unwilling to pay the costs of not just upgrading off of mainframes (aka the rewrite work itself)... but of changing their processes. That is where the real cost is at:

When you have 213.000 employees like BoA has and everyone needs to have at least 10 hours of training and 2 weeks until they're familiar with the new system enough to be fully productive, that's like 2 million man-hours just for training and 16 million hours in lost productivity, so assuming $50/h average salary it's around 900 million dollars in cost. Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, the demands of both the customers and (at least in Europe) regulatory agencies especially for real-time financial transfers just push the old mainframe stuff to limits, while at the same time banks don't want to cede more and more of that cake to Paypal and friends that charge quite the sum for (effectively) lending money to banks.

In contrast, all the newcomers start with greenfield IT, most likely some sort of more-or-less standard SAP. That one actually supports running unit and integration tests automatically, drastically reducing the chance of fuck-ups that might draw in unwanted regulatory attention.

> ...employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement.

Um oh yeah, the reason we're hiring 20-year-olds is because we want to ensure we have lifelong support for the new system we're writing. Not because they're cheaper, they're still idealistic and naive, they'll work long hours for foosball tables and stacks, or anything like that...

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below:

The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one wants to use it so it is "dead" but it runs everything that made the modern age possible.

RUST:

println!("Enter number: ");

let mut input_string = String::new();

io::stdin().read_line(&mut input_string).unwrap();

let number: i32 = input_string.trim().parse().expect("Please enter a valid number.");

let result = if number % 2 == 0 {

    "EVEN"

} else {

    "ODD"

};

println!("The number: {}", result);

COBOL:

display 'Enter number: '

accept number

if function mod(number,2) = 0

    move 'even' to result

else

    move 'odd' to result

end-if

display 'The number: ',result