COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
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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
#2Started 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.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#3almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it?
COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#4Started 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.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#5"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.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#6Started 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 imagine the backwards compatibility story of COBOL is a little better than Python's
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#7almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!
I think the moat that COBOL developers have is not just their knowledge of the language, but knowledge of the mainframe programming and operating environment. Its just so alien to developers familiar with Windows/Linux, and there is really no way to get experience with the environment that I know of, other than to be employed doing it.
But yeah that stuff is never going away as far as I can tell. Its just too risky to rewrite those core systems and many a boondoggle has tried and failed.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#8almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!
Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#9almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!
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.
Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
#10"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?