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This was a higher-effort post than I had expected. The Game of Life implementation pushes itself into my Back-button browser history, which is rather annoying,
by llarsson 6y ago
This was a higher-effort post than I had expected.
The Game of Life implementation pushes itself into my Back-button browser history, which is rather annoying, but it was very cool to see some COBOL besides the obligatory Hello World.
I hardly think anyone maintaining crusty old systems will be allowed to move to Cloudflare Workers, but it is rather amazing and funny to see that it could technically now be done.
Great job and great post!
- pgt 6y agoI think you’d be surprised how eager the owners of crusty mainframe systems are to stop managing ancient infra and how heavily they have been sold on serverless / “the cloud”.
- marktangotango 6y agoI think it's important to note that this isn't an option to "get off the mainframe". Gnu Cobol doesn't support CICS, nor some other things the mainframe provides. There are "rehosting" options, both free and for pay, this isn't one. To clarify some more, rehosting options range from "pick up and drop source files and data to the new system" to "we can do it but it's almost as much effort as rewriting the whole thing".
- jonny_eh 6y agoI can't imagine it's easier to port mainframe cobol to Cloudflare, instead of rewriting it in TypeScript or whatever.
- mywittyname 6y agoI'm sure most places have tried numerous times before and failed.
- nabla9 6y agoAt this point most systems that are easier and more cost effective to operate on cloud are already there. If you need the IBM Z level cryptography, security and reliability it's trying to replicate same with other hardware is very costly.
- kev009 6y agoI've never really heard this from anyone that is actually technical. I think people with actual technical skills and joy would be quite impressed by mainframe systems. The issue for management is you can't copy someone else's strategy like hiring random fungible devs so easily, you need to invest in some training and retaining. So if you're a stuffed shirt the easiest thing to do to explain your lack of leadership and foresight is to point to the mysterious system and point to other companies doing (x, y or z) and say you need to be more like them in a copycat way with little consideration for the difficulty or success of the existing business and systems. The evergreening that goes on in tech is extremely low dividend activity for any business but the new employees and new vendors make a lot of money until they too are out fashioned.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 6y agoMy impression is that the nature of mainframe systems and the applications that run on them is that they're essentially fully custom operations that could serve as full-stack object lessons in Conway's Law.
- strbean 6y agoReally? My impression is that you have to scour the earth for people who know anything about those systems, and then pay them 5x what you would pay someone working on a modern system.
- kev009 6y agoDid you like.. actually read my comment? Poorly run companies want the equivalent of a Scala dev with 30 years of Scala experience. It doesn't work like that. Computer systems and PLs aren't that hard to pick up.
- lioeters 6y agoI second this, thoroughly enjoyed the article. Expecting a short announcement about adding COBOL support, I was instead treated to an educational journey about the language, amusing history and examples, technical decisions on implementation, and a practical tutorial on getting started. Bravo!