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> She envisions aging banks using it to upgrade decades-old Fortran code to Ruby or any other modern language. I know it's just an article, but... If anyone t

> She envisions aging banks using it to upgrade decades-old Fortran code to Ruby or any other modern language. I know it's just an article, but... If anyone thinks they should replace working Fortran code that does numerical analysis with Ruby, they should be fired.

tholford 11y ago
I used to work at a TBTF financial institution. During orientation, they told us that their mainframes process roughly 1/3 of US credit card transactions. The low-level code is 40-year old Fortran that still performs swimmingly.
- cyansmoker 11y ago
  People think of Fortran and Cobol as similar, due to their age. Put simply: they are not.
gravypod 11y ago
You have to conflicting issues on this point. The first being that the code works fine, the deployment works fine, everything is working just fine. Do. Not. Touch. It. These are some of the most financially important systems in America to date. It's not a question about if they have to work, it's a question about just how bad things would get if they didn't work for even a day. The next problem that comes up is what happens when someone finds a bug 60, 40, or even 10 years in the future? What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house. Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable. Eventually something has to give and we can do two things until then. 1. Wait for time to pass and pretend nothing will ever happen to these machines. 2. Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to have backups/fallbacks when planning for the future. I'm not saying that Ruby or any new language should be entrusted with this kind of responsibility. But there needs to be a decision and it needs to be made over the next couple of decades.
- ska 11y ago
  "Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists." This process is obvious, and has been going on for decades already. There are challenges of course, but thinking the problem is coding infrastructure and the lack of "modern" languages like ruby is a category error.
  - gravypod 11y ago
    I agree, that is not the way I feel. You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language.
    - brandonmenc 11y ago
      > You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language. In what way? Fortran code is certainly not lower level than C and in many cases higher level. Furthermore, they are closer in age, for example, than Smalltalk is to Ruby.
      - gravypod 11y ago
        Fortran: Created 1957 C: Created 1972 And those where not simply 15 years, they were a very important 15 years of development. Relatively, C is more modern than Fortran. It is also certainly more widespread.
- plq 11y ago
  > What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house. You get a modern Fortran compiler, you compile the old code for the new stuff and off you go. What am I missing? > Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable. Like ALL languages? Ha, tell that to the COBOL programmers at the heart of some financial institutions mate. Heck, RPG is still supported on some IBM hardware.
Dirlewanger 11y ago
Yeah, this scared me. I'm in webdev, and while it does have its worrying trends with regards to the larger trade of programming, they are largely insular and contained. Only way to explain this kind of behavior is to have worked your entire career in webdev (with horse blinders on) and have next-to-no understanding of computer science. That, or she doesn't give a shit because Github is paying her a fuck-ton not to. I'm going to guess in this case, it's the latter.

tholford 11y ago

I used to work at a TBTF financial institution. During orientation, they told us that their mainframes process roughly 1/3 of US credit card transactions. The low-level code is 40-year old Fortran that still performs swimmingly.

cyansmoker 11y ago
People think of Fortran and Cobol as similar, due to their age. Put simply: they are not.

gravypod 11y ago

You have to conflicting issues on this point. The first being that the code works fine, the deployment works fine, everything is working just fine. Do. Not. Touch. It. These are some of the most financially important systems in America to date. It's not a question about if they have to work, it's a question about just how bad things would get if they didn't work for even a day. The next problem that comes up is what happens when someone finds a bug 60, 40, or even 10 years in the future? What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house. Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable. Eventually something has to give and we can do two things until then. 1. Wait for time to pass and pretend nothing will ever happen to these machines. 2. Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to have backups/fallbacks when planning for the future. I'm not saying that Ruby or any new language should be entrusted with this kind of responsibility. But there needs to be a decision and it needs to be made over the next couple of decades.

ska 11y ago
"Slowly start rewriting all of the stack, and transferring everything to more modern systems designed to be just as long term as their predecessors so that in the event of a replacement being needed it exists." This process is obvious, and has been going on for decades already. There are challenges of course, but thinking the problem is coding infrastructure and the lack of "modern" languages like ruby is a category error.
- gravypod 11y ago
  I agree, that is not the way I feel. You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language.
  - brandonmenc 11y ago
    > You must remember that relatively speaking compared to Fortran, C is a "modern" language. In what way? Fortran code is certainly not lower level than C and in many cases higher level. Furthermore, they are closer in age, for example, than Smalltalk is to Ruby.
    - gravypod 11y ago
      Fortran: Created 1957 C: Created 1972 And those where not simply 15 years, they were a very important 15 years of development. Relatively, C is more modern than Fortran. It is also certainly more widespread.
plq 11y ago
> What happens when some of this old hardware breaks and it becomes not only impossible to find replacement parts but also impossible to fabricate new ones in house. You get a modern Fortran compiler, you compile the old code for the new stuff and off you go. What am I missing? > Eventually, like all languages, Fortran will die out as time goes on. So few people know it now that it is inevitable. Like ALL languages? Ha, tell that to the COBOL programmers at the heart of some financial institutions mate. Heck, RPG is still supported on some IBM hardware.

Dirlewanger 11y ago

Yeah, this scared me. I'm in webdev, and while it does have its worrying trends with regards to the larger trade of programming, they are largely insular and contained. Only way to explain this kind of behavior is to have worked your entire career in webdev (with horse blinders on) and have next-to-no understanding of computer science. That, or she doesn't give a shit because Github is paying her a fuck-ton not to. I'm going to guess in this case, it's the latter.