4 ms·

The sad irony is that it is the termination of COBOL that could actually bring society to its knees. If Java died, it wouldn't take long for all that code to be

The sad irony is that it is the termination of COBOL that could actually bring society to its knees. If Java died, it wouldn't take long for all that code to be rewritten in Go. But how many COBOL programmers do you know?

DanHulton 13y ago
Oh, it's worse than that. I took three years of it in community college and could probably pick it up again in a hurry. If I did pick it up again, I could probably easily double my current (very reasonable) salary. But I'll be damned if I go back to writing COBOL, and I know a great many programmers like myself who feel the same way. And (modesty aside for a second here) they tend to be the better programmers. So you're left with the "for-the-paycheque" programmers writing COBOL, and the programmers who couldn't find a job they cared about more. That's who's going to be rewriting all those mission-critical COBOL apps once people want to start expanding into more modern languages.
bilbo0s 13y ago
"...If Java died, it wouldn't take long for all that code to be rewritten in Go..." Guy... You don't just rewrite code that's been through the FDA approval process. It doesn't work like that. If you want to replace a java or c based medical imaging viewer... you can... but you have to prove it won't kill anybody. Or make any doctors cut off the left leg instead of the right one because a transform is flipped due to a DICOM attribute being interpreted incorrectly. Or that RTP calculations are still correct, and the PET/CT fusion is registering correctly. You can't get Radiation dosage calculations wrong by even a tiny amount. And you have to prove all of that to the FDA and sign thousands of sheets of documentation swearing to it. And the standard fine print in that documentation makes you criminally liable if a bug is found. And that's just 1 tiny industry that java is used in. Multiply that difficulty by every life and death or money based industry and you begin to get an idea of what a monumental task getting rid of java would be. Think oil extraction and exploration systems... uh... no excuses there... they MUST work. Think industrial control systems... software for nuclear facilities, or even software for a simple coal based energy plant, can't just be thrown together. People in a city or area depend on these facilities to meet their energy needs. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you... what is your definition of "wouldn't take long"?
- transfire 13y ago
  I made the assumption that we would still have access to the original source code. So it wouldn't be so hard to translate Java to another modern language, e.g. one of the most modern being Go. On the other hand, so few people know COBOL these days that even with source code, translating those systems would take considerably longer.

DanHulton 13y ago

Oh, it's worse than that. I took three years of it in community college and could probably pick it up again in a hurry. If I did pick it up again, I could probably easily double my current (very reasonable) salary. But I'll be damned if I go back to writing COBOL, and I know a great many programmers like myself who feel the same way. And (modesty aside for a second here) they tend to be the better programmers. So you're left with the "for-the-paycheque" programmers writing COBOL, and the programmers who couldn't find a job they cared about more. That's who's going to be rewriting all those mission-critical COBOL apps once people want to start expanding into more modern languages.

bilbo0s 13y ago

"...If Java died, it wouldn't take long for all that code to be rewritten in Go..." Guy... You don't just rewrite code that's been through the FDA approval process. It doesn't work like that. If you want to replace a java or c based medical imaging viewer... you can... but you have to prove it won't kill anybody. Or make any doctors cut off the left leg instead of the right one because a transform is flipped due to a DICOM attribute being interpreted incorrectly. Or that RTP calculations are still correct, and the PET/CT fusion is registering correctly. You can't get Radiation dosage calculations wrong by even a tiny amount. And you have to prove all of that to the FDA and sign thousands of sheets of documentation swearing to it. And the standard fine print in that documentation makes you criminally liable if a bug is found. And that's just 1 tiny industry that java is used in. Multiply that difficulty by every life and death or money based industry and you begin to get an idea of what a monumental task getting rid of java would be. Think oil extraction and exploration systems... uh... no excuses there... they MUST work. Think industrial control systems... software for nuclear facilities, or even software for a simple coal based energy plant, can't just be thrown together. People in a city or area depend on these facilities to meet their energy needs. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you... what is your definition of "wouldn't take long"?

transfire 13y ago
I made the assumption that we would still have access to the original source code. So it wouldn't be so hard to translate Java to another modern language, e.g. one of the most modern being Go. On the other hand, so few people know COBOL these days that even with source code, translating those systems would take considerably longer.