4 ms·

This reminds me of rust: even if rust will be widespread in 10 or 20 years, it will not really displace C++. Although I need a engineering explanation as to wh

• 0points 1y ago
  > COBOL Was popular in the 60s in fintech, so banks, ATM:s and related systems went digital using it. Those systems are still running.
  • graealex 1y ago
    Although you can do a bit of Ship-of-Theseus philosophy on those COBOL systems. After every software component has been rewritten multiple times and every hardware has died and subsequently got replaced, all that's left is the decision to stick with COBOL, not the fact that it's a legacy system built in the 60s.
• fsloth 1y ago
  Can’t live forever? Latin is still going strong as well as water pipes (oldest being several millenia old). Hard to predict which innovations remain resilient. The longer they stick around the more ”Lindy-proof” they are.
• jt2190 1y ago
  The explanation for COBOL is not an engineering one, but an economics one: “It’s cheaper to train a programmer to use COBOL than it is to rewrite the codebase in <language>.” (Perhaps LLMs might change the economics here.)
  • leptons 1y ago
    "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" also applies here. There is also no guarantee that whatever new language you port the COBOL code to won't also be seen as obsolete in a few years. Software developers are a fickle bunch.