Is PERL dead yet?
No
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
91–100 of 448 posts
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us. [edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters…
Oof, I've got good news and bad news for you.... they still are creating new code in it. Yeah, there are fewer engineers in COBOL which is why it pays BIG bucks now. They desperately need someone to maintain that massive infrastructure that has been built up over 75 years that cannot be replaced easily or quickly.
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Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#93Huh, so it mentions 4GLs… what generation would we consider rust/kotlin/swift then?
The modern analogue of 4GLs would be the promise of LLMs letting you write prompts so you don't have to learn a programming language; the promise of the original 4GLs like Pearl (not to be confused with perl) and Objectstar was to let you have non-programmers writing business logic without being COBOL or FORTRAN programmers.
Ironically, the whole reason COBOL has its weird-ass syntax was to let you have non-programmers writing business logic without being assembly or C programmers. We can see how well that worked.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think it’s more that computers at the time didn’t all have lowercase characters. Consider that even C and C++ supported trigraph/digraph compatibility chars until something like last year (and IBM still complained…):
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shell script is memory safe too, but you don't write anything longer than 100 lines in it for a reason.
When you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Healthcare, COBOL. Social Security, COBOL. Point of Sale, COBOL. IRS, COBOL. Pension funds? COBOL. Hotel bookings? COBOL. Payroll programs? COBOL. It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more…
I'm a big enjoyer of arcain arts, but I happen to work in a place that actually has it and no -- nobody likes COBOL and it's not cool in any sense.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#96"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.
But are these legacy systems from the 70s, 80s, 90s using modern cobol?
Almost certainly yes. The "legacy systems" are likely running on versions of the mainframe with long-term support contracts, whose vendors are committed to providing newer compilers with support for newer versions of the specification as necessary.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#97Started 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.
I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.
I understand the context to be that COBOL, as a DSL for batch processing, declares its .data and .bss segments, or the equivalents on host systems, statically in the DATA DIVISION and usually doesn't dynamically allocate memory. This, coupled with CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth reservation from a job scheduler on an exclusive hot-swappable partition on a host (z/OS aka MVS) plus USVs, redundant disks/disk ports, and networks makes "never fail" much more a consequence and primary objective of mainframe architectures where COBOL workloads are usually run.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#98You 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…
Ada is an order of magnitude more modern and sophisticated than your other examples. I expect Ada will capture 0.05% of the market for the next 100 years.
Fair, I guess the list was “languages that I know were popular at one point but I don’t know anyone really using now”.
Ada definitely does seem pretty cool from the little bit I have read about it. I’m not sure why it’s fallen by the wayside in favor of C and its derivatives.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#99As always, these discussions will depend on your definition of "dead" and "alive". If we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it, then I think we can safely call COBOL dead (and the IBM 390x aka Z/OS platform along with it, for which "COBOL" is usually a proxy). But if we say that anything still being used in production is not dead, then of course COBOL is alive and significantly more alive tha…
> we can call a technology dead once no new business is built on it
You don’t suppose any bank - or other large financial institution - might have standardised on Cobol for their core business flows/processes? In which case a new business-unit or “internal startup” team (e.g. a new category of insurance product) might very-well have some part written in Cobol so it integrates with the rest of the bank - or at very-least might be built-on-top of the org’s existing Cobol-running infrastructure (i.e. Not written in Cobol, but still runs on Z/OS because there’s no budget for buying new commodity x86 racks and the people to manage and run them).
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#100Great story. There's something wicked personal in it, and it's very good. I reckon that this bloke's grandfather was an interesting bloke - cobol or no.