Ask HN: Why COBOL is not hip anymore? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why COBOL is not hip anymore?

4 pointsmaxpert10 comments

So I've been looking into various modern languages and have been working in few of them. While new kids like Golang, Rust, Kotlin, Crystal, and Elixir are getting great traction in today's world of writing business oriented web applications, something that was designed to be expressive is not getting enough traction. There are no mainstream languages that are inspiring their syntax from COBOL (like Elixir or Crystal did). There are no popular frameworks, no famous community or a famous company (exclude legacy) that is promoting COBOL. Looking at sample code listings I can see a huge potential where businesses can write really expressive code. Yet I don't see somebody like say Salesforce, or IBM pushing it. Why?

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https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

There was a really great COBOL programmer back in the 1990’s who was making piles of money hand over fist. But she was terribly overworked, and getting really tired of slaving away on Y2K fixes.

From all her experience fixing mission critical code, she was becoming increasingly worried that civilization was going to collapse due to Y2K bugs.

After all that hard work, she never wanted to look at another line of COBOL ever again, she was just so sick and tired of it.

So she signed up with Alcor, and had herself cryonically frozen in 1999, leaving behind explicit instructions that she was to be revived after civilization had finally put itself back together again.

Time passed by, Y2K came and went, but to her, it was only the dreamless flickering of an instant.

Finally she woke up, in a clean futuristic hospital room, surrounded by inscrutable machines that go “ping” and strangely dressed doctors with funny accents and weird hairdos.

She was just so happy to be alive that she proclaimed “Thank you so much for bringing me back to life! I am eternally grateful, and in your debt! Is there anything I can do to repay you? And by the way, what year is it?”

Then one of the doctors smiled at her cheerfully and said, “Yes, actually! It’s the year 9999, and the records indicate that you’re a COBOL programmer...”

COBOL is usually asociated with the tuple [ Old, Mainframe ].

In tech you can get a job easily learning a new technology that's getting traction and hope demand is bigger that offer. This is a classic first job / career reboot case.

For old techonologies usually demand is lower than the offer. I don't know the exact case about COBOL; but I guess since boomers are retiring now, COBOL demand out there might unexpectedly grow.

And for the Mainframe stuff... Everybody says they're expensive, even without having seen an actual Mainframe bill, so it can be wrong (and might be a competitive advantage for some).

Bit since the 90s everybody has been trying to grab that Mainframe dollars, and that's too much time. Some succeeded with Client/Server, others with Java, Linux, Virtualization...

So, COBOL land looks unsexy. When it is already stablished it gets the job done; so don't expect headlines about COBOL except when something weird shows like Y2K.

You can write expressive code in any language and you can write non-expressive code in those same languages. Real world COBOL (which would be COBOL 85 and earlier) is not going to be nearly as nice to write as many of the langauges that you provided as examples. You lack things like generics (which AFAIK are still not in the language) and collections (which show up in COBOL 2014). Until 2002 there wasn't free form COBOL either. Now, it is entirely possible for COBOL to make a comeback and become "hip", but it is going to require a lot of tooling and other development that just isn't happening now.

It never was hip I believe - the perceived userbase of COBOL were "men in suits and black leather shoes", i.e. non-tech, business/MBA staff.

COBOL was never "hip". It existed to do work, not to excite or entertain. It's the parcel van of languages -- not a Tesla, nor even an SUV.

But for a lot of needs over the past 50 years(!), that parcel van does a reliable job.

This short video provides a good explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3WVa2zyyGE

Can you provide an example of a cobol script for doing a basic CRUD etc task that you find inspiring/simple/makes the point?

Taking a look at this article https://opensource.com/article/17/8/what-about-cobol for example.

Thx

COBOL existed to turn your army of clerks into programmers. Those people no longer exist.

The modern equivalent is Java.

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