Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

So much wrong with this and the article linked in first sentence.

Just a few notes.

To be pedantic, COBOL was invented by the Navy, mostly by GMH. And to call it dead is not consistent with the humongous body of code that keeps many large institutions afloat.

And Fortran is very much alive in many scientific endeavors, including the amateur radio program WSTJX which implements various weak signal protocols such as FT8, WSPR, and JT 9. These are built by Joe Taylor, Nobel Laureate in physics for work on pulsars and their declining period due to gravitational drag. These protocols are useful in weak signal work such as amateur radio moonbounce.

And SQL was not invented by oracle but by IBM.

There are too many other flaws in both articles to list here. The definition of death here is suspect, and the reasons noted not well reasoned.

If one is truly interested in history, I suggest reading about the life and influence of not only GMH and Jean Sammet and the book covering the 120 programming languages in use in 1960.

Edit: Full disclosure: I’ve professionally programmed in a significant number of the languages here, and my career beginning predates the invention of several of the important languages noted in these articles. I have strong opinions about all of these languages and often share them whomever wants to hear them and many who don’t. (Edit typo)

The author does acknowledge that COBOL and FORTRAN are still around in the ALGOL section:

> Of the four mother languages, ALGOL is the most “dead”; Everybody still knows about LISP,2 COBOL still powers tons of legacy systems, and most scientific packages still have some FORTRAN.

Which is kinda true. COBOL and Fortran are not "dead", but they're heavily "deprecated"; I don't think there are too many systems created today in COBOL vs just maintenance and support.

Maybe it's not the same for Fortran: it still powers a big chunk of Python's scientific stack (in the scipy package).

Interesting, I assumed all high performance packages for science and math either used c or c++!

Is there a reason to use Fortran instead?

Fortran has enough critical mass in that field. I.e. good libraries and applications are written in Fortran, so enough people in the field learn Fortran and use Fortran instead of spending time rewriting stuff that works and is well-tested in C++.

It's also that there is no recognition or other incentives for developing or maintaining software in these fields. There was an article a week or so ago about a growing panic in particle physics over an important C program maintained for 40 years by a single prof who will soon retire.

From the standpoint of an optimizing compiler, Fortran is much easier to optomize. The existence of pointers in C make that much more difficult. As Francis Allen said (paraphrasing) "The prevalence of C has set back programming language research by decades."

> COBOL and Fortran are not "dead", but they're heavily "deprecated"; I don't think there are too many systems created today in COBOL vs just maintenance and support.

I don't get the sense that they are except in some segments of programming. Do you have any reference that would show that they are deprecated?

And Fortran is much bigger than scipy.

I do know that Fortran is a lot bigger than Scipy, I was just mentioning that it's "so important and relevant (still)" that it powers the whole "Data Science" Python world.

I have no sources for my claim, just complete gut feeling. I'd bet my lunch that there are more new systems started in Java than COBOL. But I'm happy to be proven wrong and fast until dinner :)

Basic also has tons of dialects that are still alive and is not just used for office macros. Visual Basic was a big language for desktop applications at one time.

Edit: Just looked it up. The last version of Visual Basic came out in 2019 so it's hardly dead.

Visual Basic .NET is as different from Visual Basic as C# from C++. They’re all different languages in their own right.

And Visual Basic is as different from BASIC as Java is from C.

I know dozens of mainframe devs (millineals) from my college still writing COBOL. Although most of them would switch domains in a heart beat if they could, I personally help two of them with courses for full-stack development using modern programming langrages.

Morbidly, I was told that COVID has killed several senior COBOL developers and so the demand for those still writing COBOL is still very high in the financial space.

> the 120 programming languages in use in 1960

Geez, I think I'd struggle to name 120 programming languages in total right now.

And there have been more than a handful invented in the intervening 60 years.

Not 120, but a decent list of stuff I'd never heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...

I guess people reinventing the wheel with a new programming language isn't just some newer-age thing, but happened frequently decades ago too.

True, though I guess they were all working in more isolated ways than we are today too. Probably the compilers were very much tied to the machines they were written on as well (I know we have lots of architectures today but I get the impression it wasn't like today where x86 dominates).

It was also common to invent "tiny languages" (e.g. PIC) and domain-specific languages (e.g. Awk, Yacc) to a greater extent than now. There was no real community to share work. I heard of OO and C++, but didn't really understand it, so when I tried to make my own I made functions that dispatched on the type of the first argument, then another version which could dispatch on the types of any the arguments. We would call this data-oriented now. I suspect that a lot of new stuff arose from such misunderstandings.

It's not dead, it's just frozen!

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

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