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> have you seen COBOL code? A lot of it Always stayed away from it > Java is much more popular and used in many more domains than COBOL ever was It was mere

> have you seen COBOL code? A lot of it Always stayed away from it > Java is much more popular and used in many more domains than COBOL ever was It was merely a comparison on the number of line codes deployed that never changed over decades and nobody wants to touch anymore because they drive critical systems, that move a lot of money The same reason why much of the COBOL in existence is still around I wasn't comparing the capabilities or the qualities of the two > And Apple and Google and Netflix and Amazon and Alibaba and governments and militaries and telcos and cedit card companies and airports and power plants and factories They rely on COBOL code too... Believe me

pron 6y ago
Then C is definitely a better comparison. Code like that exists in huge quantities in any popular language used to write long-lived software for more than a couple of decades, but COBOL wasn't really such a language, like C and Java are. It was used a lot in some rather narrow domains and then it faded. It became popular in the late sixties, and by the mid eighties it was already falling out of fashion and became very niche. It barely had twenty years of dominance. If you insist, then a more modern language with a trajectory similar to COBOL would probably be VB. > They rely on COBOL code too... And quite possibly VB, too. But those companies write much of their new software in Java. They don't do it in COBOL (or in VB).
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  C is not legacy. The same code from 20 or 30 years ago compiles today with little or no modifications Try to run a servlet from 1998 or a struts web app from 2001 with a recent JVM And yet you still find them in a lot of places, that you don't see, because you don't work with them, but that probably manage some of the transactions you make They are legacy because they are being maintained for clientst hat have been using them for at least 2 decades and are virtually untouchable, but are still being updated, slowly, to keep them running I'm not insisting, it's what it is. VB is not legacy, VB is dead No large company ever relied on VB to keep going __ever__ COBOL is still being developed, because it's still used To the point that COBOL can interface to Java or C# because companies prefer to update thei COBOL programs to call outside than rewrite them The final approved ISO (of Object oriented COBOL) standard was approved and published in late 2002.
  - pron 6y ago
    It's easier to run (and even revive) a 25-year-old applet than a 25-year-old OS/2 C application. Java has a much better backward compatibility story than C because C relies so heavily on OSes, many of which are effectively defunct. Still, there are probably billions of legacy lines of code in C, C++ and Java, and hundreds of millions of lines of code in those languages are still being written every year (in Java more than in C/C++). In fact, more new lines of code are professionally written in new Java codebases than any other language with the possible exceptions of JS and Python (although probably not). Like COBOL, existing VB code is still maintained, but very little new code is written. I'm not saying VB is exactly like COBOL, but I don't see any resemblance between Java and COBOL any more than I would between C and COBOL or Python and COBOL.
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      > It's easier to run (and even revive) a 25-year-old applet than a 25-year-old OS/2 C application Are you sure? Most of the APIs have been deprecated. Builds for modern systems (64 bit) are non existent. OS/2 has been dead for 20 years and there isn't much code being written for it anymore, I remember the Italian train company using OS/2 terminals, they have been dismissed more than a decade ago because IBM ended support for it. Ironically you can run OS/2 in your browser, but not Java applets. https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/ibm/1.0/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/ibm/1.0/ Now, to explain you what I mean when I say old Java code is as legacy as COBOL I will start with a story: it took Github a year and a half to upgrade from Rails 3.2 to Rails 5.2, on a less than 10 years old code base, to some of the best Ruby/Rails experts in the World. Imagine that there are services that government agencies use, written 20 years ago in Java, by average former COBOL programmers that wanted to try new things, that will not be rewritten soon, and if they will it will take years for them to be adopted, that are interfacing with even older code running on mainframes. Management bought the story that Java programmers were easy to find (they still are), being a Virtual Machine it would run easily (write once, run everywhere) and that was Enterprise (it was in the name). It wasn't completely true. The path Oracle pushed Java to make it compelling for new generations of programmers left behind a lot of already written and deployed code that can't be run directly on modern systems, can't be touched 'cause companies rely on that code and even if it could be upgrade there are no Java programmers that wants/are able to do it (it doesn't boost your career to work on it) if the hardware won't fail in the meantime. 2000 Java code is harder to write/maintain/upgrade for a Java programmer of 2020 than 2000 COBOL was for a COBOL programmer of the 70s. In 5-10 years, when the first generation of early Java adopters will retire, there will be billions of lines of Java code that nobody will know how to keep running. To coin an old programming phrase "The determined Real Programmer can write COBOL programs in any language"

pron 6y ago

Then C is definitely a better comparison. Code like that exists in huge quantities in any popular language used to write long-lived software for more than a couple of decades, but COBOL wasn't really such a language, like C and Java are. It was used a lot in some rather narrow domains and then it faded. It became popular in the late sixties, and by the mid eighties it was already falling out of fashion and became very niche. It barely had twenty years of dominance. If you insist, then a more modern language with a trajectory similar to COBOL would probably be VB. > They rely on COBOL code too... And quite possibly VB, too. But those companies write much of their new software in Java. They don't do it in COBOL (or in VB).

romanoderoma 6y ago
C is not legacy. The same code from 20 or 30 years ago compiles today with little or no modifications Try to run a servlet from 1998 or a struts web app from 2001 with a recent JVM And yet you still find them in a lot of places, that you don't see, because you don't work with them, but that probably manage some of the transactions you make They are legacy because they are being maintained for clientst hat have been using them for at least 2 decades and are virtually untouchable, but are still being updated, slowly, to keep them running I'm not insisting, it's what it is. VB is not legacy, VB is dead No large company ever relied on VB to keep going __ever__ COBOL is still being developed, because it's still used To the point that COBOL can interface to Java or C# because companies prefer to update thei COBOL programs to call outside than rewrite them The final approved ISO (of Object oriented COBOL) standard was approved and published in late 2002.
- pron 6y ago
  It's easier to run (and even revive) a 25-year-old applet than a 25-year-old OS/2 C application. Java has a much better backward compatibility story than C because C relies so heavily on OSes, many of which are effectively defunct. Still, there are probably billions of legacy lines of code in C, C++ and Java, and hundreds of millions of lines of code in those languages are still being written every year (in Java more than in C/C++). In fact, more new lines of code are professionally written in new Java codebases than any other language with the possible exceptions of JS and Python (although probably not). Like COBOL, existing VB code is still maintained, but very little new code is written. I'm not saying VB is exactly like COBOL, but I don't see any resemblance between Java and COBOL any more than I would between C and COBOL or Python and COBOL.
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    > It's easier to run (and even revive) a 25-year-old applet than a 25-year-old OS/2 C application Are you sure? Most of the APIs have been deprecated. Builds for modern systems (64 bit) are non existent. OS/2 has been dead for 20 years and there isn't much code being written for it anymore, I remember the Italian train company using OS/2 terminals, they have been dismissed more than a decade ago because IBM ended support for it. Ironically you can run OS/2 in your browser, but not Java applets. https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/ibm/1.0/ https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/os2/ibm/1.0/ Now, to explain you what I mean when I say old Java code is as legacy as COBOL I will start with a story: it took Github a year and a half to upgrade from Rails 3.2 to Rails 5.2, on a less than 10 years old code base, to some of the best Ruby/Rails experts in the World. Imagine that there are services that government agencies use, written 20 years ago in Java, by average former COBOL programmers that wanted to try new things, that will not be rewritten soon, and if they will it will take years for them to be adopted, that are interfacing with even older code running on mainframes. Management bought the story that Java programmers were easy to find (they still are), being a Virtual Machine it would run easily (write once, run everywhere) and that was Enterprise (it was in the name). It wasn't completely true. The path Oracle pushed Java to make it compelling for new generations of programmers left behind a lot of already written and deployed code that can't be run directly on modern systems, can't be touched 'cause companies rely on that code and even if it could be upgrade there are no Java programmers that wants/are able to do it (it doesn't boost your career to work on it) if the hardware won't fail in the meantime. 2000 Java code is harder to write/maintain/upgrade for a Java programmer of 2020 than 2000 COBOL was for a COBOL programmer of the 70s. In 5-10 years, when the first generation of early Java adopters will retire, there will be billions of lines of Java code that nobody will know how to keep running. To coin an old programming phrase "The determined Real Programmer can write COBOL programs in any language"