Comment by brightball
6 hours ago
Heard an excellent COBOL talk this summer that really helped me to understand it. The speaker was fairly confident that COBOL wasn't going away anytime soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7Q7u0pZyQ&list=PLxeenGqMmm...
First of all, that conference is right down the road from me, and I never knew about it. So, thanks for sharing!
My first job was working at a credit union software company. I designed and built the front-end (windows applications, a telephone banking system, and a home-banking web thing) and middle-tier systems (VB.NET-based services). The real back-end, though, was an old COBOL system.
I remember helping the COBOL programmers debug some stuff, and it was just so wildly foreign. My degree is in theoretical comp sci, and I'd seen a lot of different languages, including Prolog, various lisps and schemes, SQL, ADA, C++, C, Pascal, various assembly variants, but COBOL was simply unique. I've often wondered what ideas COBOL got right that we could learn from and leverage today in a new language.
I do remember our COBOL mainframes were really fast compared to the SQL Server layers my middle-tier services used, but I also remember looking at it and thinking it would be a giant pain to write (the numbers at the front of every line seemed like tedium that I would probably often get wrong).
Nice! Call for Speakers will be opening this week if you know anybody who may be interested. https://carolina.codes
Both Fortran and COBOL will be here long after many of the current languages have disappeared. They are unique to their domains viz. Fortran for Scientific Computing and COBOL for Business Data Processing with a huge amount of installed code-base much of it for critical systems.
Don't know about COBOL, but FORTRAN and Ada definitely would survive an Extinction Level Event on earth.
Plenty of space based stuff running Ada and maybe some FORTRAN.
The key to understanding their longevity lies in the fact that they were the earliest high-level languages invented at a time when all software was built for serious long-lived stuff viz. Banking, Insurance, Finance, Simulations, Numerical Analysis, Embedded etc. Computing was strictly Science/Mathematics/Business and so a lot of very smart domain experts and programmers built systems to last from the ground up.
1 reply →
In my experience working with large financial institutions and banks, there is plenty of running COBOL code that is around the average age of HN posters. Where as a lot of different languages code is replaced over time with something better/faster COBOL seems to have a staying power in financial that will ensure it's around a very very long time.
I wasn’t aware of this until that talk, but COBOL essentially being both the logic and the database together makes it very sticky.
What do you assume the average age of HN posters to be?
35-40, though it could be just a bit older as there is no official metric on this.