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"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing fr
by msla 2y ago
"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare
COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.
- j0hnyl 2y agoBut are these legacy systems from the 70s, 80s, 90s using modern cobol?
- ithkuil 2y agoWhen you hear about people being paid $X vs 10x$X to fix some cobol; is there a correlation between the age of the cobol system?
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoProbably not; just a matter of how desperate they are.
- ithkuil 2y agoWhich is also a function of how hard it is to find someone who has the required skills to address the problem
- jcranmer 2y agoAlmost certainly yes. The "legacy systems" are likely running on versions of the mainframe with long-term support contracts, whose vendors are committed to providing newer compilers with support for newer versions of the specification as necessary.
- NikolaNovak 2y agoDepends what you mean; but not necessarily. I am managing an ERP system implemented / went live in 2016. It's working on modern P10 hardware, which was released in 2021. The ERP system is continually updated by the vendor and customized by the client. Even for COBOL running on an actual mainframe, which I think most HNers would think of 1970s dinosaur, most of the actual machines in production would be pretty new. IBM z16 was launched in 2022. So they are "legacy systems" in the sense they're not written on a javascript framework which was launched last week, running on lambda instances in AWS :). But they are not "OLD" systems, as such.
- zifpanachr23 2y agoYep, the system is old in the same way that we could call x86 "old". The architecture is backwards compatible with instructions going back to the mid 1960s...but that doesn't mean new instructions and updates to the ISA aren't being pushed out on a pretty regular cadence. The new Telum II processor (and certainly this also implies another big ISA update and new hardware cycle) was announced at Hot Chips just a few weeks ago for example. See: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/09/08/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-mainframe-with-a-unique-caching-strategy/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/09/08/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-...
- Animats 2y agoNobody writes MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ON SIZE ERROR STOP RUN. any more.
- graypegg 2y agoI mean, if you squint your eyes a bit, that could be SQL! So even if it's not COBOL, there's people out there writing in a vaguely english business programming language.
- zozbot234 2y agoThe nice thing about a vaguely English like language is that your average LLM is going to do a better job of making sense of it. Because it can leverage its learnings from the entire training set, not just the code-specific portion of it.
- kibwen 2y agoNot for generating it, because the more it looks like prose the more the LLM's output will be influenced by all the prose it's ingested.
- crackez 2y agoI've used o365 copilot to analyze a COBOL app I had source code to, and it was great at explaining how the code worked. Made writing an interface to it a breeze with some sample code and I swear I am not a COBOL person, I'm just the Linux guy trying to help a buddy out... It also does a reasonable job of generating working COBOL. I had to fix up just a few errors in the data definitions as the llm generated badly sized data members, but it was pretty smooth. Much smoother than my experiences with llm's and Python. What a crap shoot Python is with llm's...
- valval 2y agoThe exact opposite is true.
- 2y ago
- 9659 2y agoThis was almost true in 2000. It is not true now. Things change. Slowly.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoMore accurate might be "I don't know what the language of 2000 will be called, but I know it will look like Fortran."
- TMWNN 2y ago> "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare Kemeny and Kurtz described Fortran as "old-fashioned" in 1968! <https://dtss.dartmouth.edu/sciencearticle/index.html https://dtss.dartmouth.edu/sciencearticle/index.html>
- randomdata 2y agoHence "I don't know what the language [...] will look like". Hoare seems to have made that remark around the same time work to redesign Fortran, what eventually became Fortran 90, began. Presumably he was aware of that effort and thought that Fortran would be able to keep reinventing itself as future needs dictated.