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by manishsharan 4428 days ago
Does the OP even know what made COBOL successful and useful ? Or for that matter , does the OP even know a Cobol programmer ? I suspect the answer is no and yet his blog is being discussed on HN front page. Cobol predates the RDBMS and made a lot of sense when writing structured data to flat file systems. Cobol language and cobol programmers never aspired to do a general purpose computing. Back in those days, the scientists wrote their programs in fortran and businesses wrote their code in cobol and most computing was done on IBM systems. Then came minicomputers with DBASE. And so on. If you are a canadian, I can guarantee you that most of your RRSP backend data processing is still being done on Cobol ; I had a bruising experience when a newly minted CIO decided to do away with all cobol and replace it with modern langauges ( c# etc.) Long story short, the CIO moved on to another unfortunate company , millions of dollars wasted and the cobol code is still working.

And now, get off my lawn !
2 comments
jeremiep 4428 days ago
New programmers who don't want to learn old technologies to maintain existing code bases will most likely want to replace it with something they know. It's almost always a very bad idea.

All of these "x is the future" articles show a huge lack of perspective on what made languages successful in the first place and why they're still in use today.

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Karunamon 4428 days ago
Often the "why they're still in use today" when describing legacy tech can be described as a combination of fear of change, lack of resources, and technical debt (the result of both of those things).

Not because it was or is the best tool, not because it's the most efficient or the most performant or most readable, but because simple mundane politics and FUD.

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jeremiep 4428 days ago
There's also the cost of upgrading a code base to a more modern language vs the benefits of working in the new language.

Most legacy projects I've worked with were not that hard and costly to maintain. Rewriting these code bases would definitely cost more than what would be saved afterwards.

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0xdeadbeefbabe 4428 days ago
Well at least he has a vague sense that history can repeat itself, and he's doing his part to assure that by not really knowing about COBOL.
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