

Scala Less Popular Than COBOL: Programming In The Real World - cassandravoiton
http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/04/scala-less-popular-than-cobol.html

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dons
Friends don't let friends cite TIOBE.

BTW, for fun, see this recent job for a Haskell expert in India -
[http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-
exper...](http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-expert-jobs/)
\-- turns out (I asked) they're developing tools to translate COBOL into more
modern languages, since you can't hire COBOL programmers anymore.

Of course, the translation tool is in Haskell. :}

~~~
JulianMorrison
Or perhaps, they want to write a COBOL monad...

~~~
cassandravoiton
Sounds like a challenge. Should be do-able in managed COBOL using delegates.

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Roboprog
Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing
ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date.

Looking at the line graphs allows us to intuit the "first order" derivative of
the popularity graph. COBOL has a negative derivative, Scala has a positive
derivative. There might be more people employed maintaining COBOL, but which
field is shedding jobs, and which is hiring, if only a little?

I'm a little bit biased, because I have actually used Scala a tiny bit at
work. I found a niche that it is actually quite good at: one-off scripting on
top of existing Java application code.

Scala may compile slow, but when you are running a 200 line script to do some
research, having concise code with a few functions passing around a few lists
and tuples, which allows you to "just twiddle a bit, hit 'up arrow' and rerun"
is a win.

I've never developed an application in Scala, and I probably never will, but I
love it for scripting.

Oh, and I have worked on RPG a bit, too, but that was in the early 90s.
Actually, not so much programmed in RPG as worked on a product to translate
RPG into C on various OSs. Whether or not the clients continued programming in
RPG using a cross compiler, or took their C code and ran, I can't say. YMMV
:-)

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dhconnelly
Another indication of how far removed we HN readers are from the real world,
where people get shit done instead of argue about semicolons.

~~~
danieldk
Except that services like Twitter are used massively in the real world and do
use Scala.

They are both languages in the tails, although different tails: Scala
currently only has early adopters, Cobol is mostly used in systems that are in
maintenance model. Scala has the potential to get a bigger slice of the pie,
while Cobol's glory days are past.

~~~
fiskah
Whether Cobol's glory days are past or not, is really depending on the
industry.

In banking, and there are plenty of examples of brand new systems being rolled
out in Cobol.

~~~
soc88
... and also in Scala, although I agree that COBOL will remain in use until
the end of mankind. :-)

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dkhenry
So if the point of this article is to say that we shouldn't buy into hype then
I agree. However to try to claim that the Tiobe represents anything close to
an accurate portrayal of programming language popularity is nonsensical. also
this idea that web hype and the "Real World" don't match up is flawed. Most
things get web hype because they are doing things in this real world.

~~~
bigbob
Agreed. TIOBE is only a part of gauging a language's popularity. TIOBE looks
at the results of search engines regardless of the recency of the search
results. So older languages will obviously have more sticking power. I like to
look at current job offerings, google trends, and book trends along with TIOBE
when gauging a language's popularity.

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CookWithMe
From wikipedia: "Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or common, or
having a high social status."

I doubt that Scala is less liked than COBOL, however, due to the age of COBOL,
it is very likely that COBOL is more common. Don't really see the point of the
article. Either it states obvious news or it kinda claims that of all
programmers out there, most will choose COBOL over Scala (which I doubt
heavily and there is no data to back that up - but that is probably the more
interesting question on popularity).

Anyway, I did a bit more than a Hello World with COBOL in university. I know
companies are searching like mad for COBOL programmers and you could earn a
shitload of money... But I won't do that stuff for the rest of my life!

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wglb
Ogod--RPG?? From a previous life, that was the only language that made me want
to go to COBOL.

Ok, not to put too fine a point on it, "talked about" doesn't mean "popular".

For a better perspective, check out the pay you can get for working COBOL vs,
say, Rails. That is a bit more enlightening.

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devel45a
First of all Cobol is actually quite widely used for legacy systems.

As as been covered frequently Tiobe is a poor indicator of language popularity
especially for Scala. e.g. capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/language-
popularity-its-not-about-search-engine-result-counts/

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code-dog
I guess that is not the real point of the post. It seems to be more about
keeping grounded and not taking 'the buzz' too seriously.

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samstokes
TL;DR: "Scala is dead; Netcraft confirms it."

In which a survey of dubious relevance is used as evidence for an argument
about the relevance of a programming language.

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PaulHoule
I did a short stint of Scala programming and I didn't like it.

The last straw was when I spent a few days debugging something involving
actors that the author of the code didn't understand. It took 15 minutes to
reimplement this flawlessly with Java's ExecutorService and that handled all
the tough problems like error handling.

I learned a lot from Scala that I carried into my Java programming, but I
wouldn't start a project in Scala.

~~~
code-dog
I like scala but the compiler is slooooooooow. The tooling needs work before
it can be main stream.

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soc88
> That must be a accident of the way TIOBE is put together yes? No!

I had at least expected that the author did his 5 minutes of research to
discover that there are indeed issues affecting rankings of languages like
Scala, Haskell, ...

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mrspeaker
And "Two and a Half Men" is more popular than... well I don't know TV, but you
get my half-assed point.

