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Do people solve really hard problems with COBAL? I thought it was primarily a business language that replaces a lot of manual work. What sort of things has it f
by gaadd33 9y ago
Do people solve really hard problems with COBAL? I thought it was primarily a business language that replaces a lot of manual work. What sort of things has it found a niche for? Similar to how FORTRAN is used a lot in big data/physics?
- Dangeranger 9y agoEvery bank, insurance, airline, and electric utility in the world older than 25 years old has a mountain of critical, working, and legacy software running COBOL and FORTRAN. With the generation of programmers who wrote the code retiring it’s even more entrenched because even though they rely on that code dearly, few if any people remember why it does what it does how it does it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> With the generation of programmers who wrote the code retiring For many big COBOL systems that’s long past; in many cases the programmers that were coming on board when that generation retired are near retirement.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wastedhours 9y agoI've often thought it's probably a cracking time to be get some COBOL skills - you could jack your day rate up to the point you could probably name your price. There's an institutional incentive to replace it eventually, so not a long term thing, but you could probably milk it for a good few years.
- Nilef 9y agoI know COBOL programmers whose day rate is considerably north of £1000
- gaadd33 9y agoThat doesn't address the question I was asking, of course there are a lot of legacy COBOL systems out there. Do any of those legacy systems work on "hard problems" similar to how FORTRAN is still used in fluid dynamics, physics, crystallography and chemistry?