[rossdavidh]

I would also like to read a well-written analysis of COBOL, what it did right and what it did wrong.

A problem the article doesn't mention, is that the percentage of still-programming developers who are young (<30 years) is higher than in other professions, for several reasons, so the lessons learned 15 years ago are often lost.

[agumonkey]

The few I know is the language tried to be so easy to read by anybody that it made creating abstraction impossible. If the problem fits cobol, you get a nanoSQL like DSL to manage on disk records nicely. If it doesn't (controlling multiple sub systems, ad-hoc state, graphs) it becomes a monstrosity. Over the years IBM and others tried to fix that by making tooling or having nicer languages transpiling down to COBOL, which lead to ever bigger monstrosity. I was shown old code base blending manual code + generated code + manual patch of the two.. it was a kind of office prank to let new guys read that for a day.

[SwoopsFromAbove]

You see, this sounds really cool. So what kinds of problems fit COBOL? And why did "we" conclude from this that general purpose languages were the solution, rather than building many different languages for specific problems? Did "we" even conclude that, or is that just my impression, 50 years later?

[marcus_holmes]

From what I remember of the times, it was the PC that killed COBOL.

COBOL was considered a "serious" language, for "serious" business problems running on "serious" hardware that lived in a server room.

PC's were not "serious", and lived on people's desks, running Lotus123 and other such trivial tools.

Then VB/Delphi/etc came along, and a generation of developers writing "little" applications directly for the desktop (of which I was one, and it was fun). You could consider these as specialist DSL's for user interactive applications. But that was not the general view.

Writing an application in VB was several orders of magnitude cheaper than writing the equivalent in COBOL, and if you squinted hard enough from a non-technical point of view they did the same job. Non-COBOL developers started writing server applications that lived on a PC in the server room for a fraction of the cost of a COBOL application living on a mainframe.

And that was that.

Except, of course, for the large institutions (banks being the obvious example) who had invested millions in developing their core applications in COBOL running on mainframes. The cost of rewriting this for no reason (because the original still works) is prohibitive. Y2K gave them a shock, but also added to the sunk cost. They still run COBOL on mainframes, and still train up new developers in COBOL.

[watt]

> Writing an application in VB was several orders of magnitude cheaper

Order of magnitude is big deal, can you be more specific, did you mean 2 or 3 orders of magnitude? Or what exactly did you mean.

By this logic if writing an app in VB costs 20$ then COBOL equivalent cost 2000$ or 20 000$ ?

Ok, 20$ seems a bit too cheap, let's see, if developing VB app cost 400$. So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?

[abernard1]

> So COBOL equivalent would have cost either 40 000$ or 400 000$ ? Is that what you mean?

If he didn't mean that, I will say, yes, that is correct. You could do things in VB in a day that teams of people in COBOL would take months to do. Many things in VB are basically impossible to do in COBOL.

For some perspective, the reason why many Medicare reforms in the U.S. are not able to be implemented is because the government is unable to actually modify the software. The code that figures out how to bill Medicare is 50 years old, has 8 million lines of code and 1.5 million lines of assembly [1].

Another high profile failure was when CA couldn't furlough state employees because they couldn't figure out how to update the software (a feature, not a bug, for many).

[1] https://www.programmableweb.com/news/how-usds-modernizing-me...

[marcus_holmes]

I worked on the Y2K project for a large infrastructure company in the UK.

I was getting paid £50/hour to write VB code and maintain an Access database for the change control system that the COBOL devs used. They were getting paid around £500/hour, because most of them had been hauled out of retirement, to actually change the COBOL code. There were ~1000 people in the building I was in, around half of them devs, around half of those the COBOL guys. The project lasted ~2 years. So, back of envelope maths: 500x250x40x(52-4)x2=£480,000,000. That was just to pay the COBOL devs to amend the codebase for just the billing system.

So yeah, at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, I'd say.

[MisterTea]

A friends first job out of uni was working for IBM on bank maintenance contracts writing COBOL. He considered it a "useless yet valuable skill."

[agumonkey]

IMO, society doesn't conclude, it reacts, mostly by imitation and deviation. Among long term cycles