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Comment by IncRnd | Hacker News Reader

What is intrinsically wrong with running systems on COBOL? These systems have a very long lifetime, and COBOL has worked for that entire time.

Would it really be an improvement to rewrite a banks's backend processing software in the latest fad flavor of language and framework? We know those would become obsolete in a year.

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Not everything newer than COBOL is a fad. Python or Java will still be written many years from now. Maybe not 50 years from now but some languages will not go away anytime soon.

I think Java is in group that is used in 50 years. Python might fall way of perl, php and others... Specially if there will be 4.0...

Say what you will about its merits, but PHP is used by over 75% of websites today[1]. Rumors of its demise are monumentally exaggerated.

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

Only threat to Java is the success of the JVM, that Java could be replaced by another JVM language seamlessly, but the JVM itself will definitely be here and developed 50 years from now.

Nothing really, but I imagine a COBOL compiler (and possibly a runtime/execution environment) that still gets updated doesn't come cheap anymore. If I were writing a new banking host today I'd write it in Java or C# and be hopeful that the tech will have a longer shelf life than COBOL.

As far as I know GNU COBOL is free. At least that's what I saw when running jsfiddle for COBOL.

https://www.jdoodle.com/execute-cobol-online/

Ah right - I've never used COBOL but I thought IBM had a compiler and tools and I didn't think it would be free by any stretch.

Java won't be gone in a year: we already have Java software running for decades and I know many banks, insurers, governments do; it will be running decades from now. Too much investment into these systems.

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