Ask HN: Is COBOL ever going to be obsolete? - SconniGeek
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marktangotango
There are lots of perfectly usable, productive, and profitable applications
written in cobol, still chugging along, making, in some cases, $millions for
their owners. Often these are government organizations or large enterprises
who have no incentive to change, and lots of reasons not too.

One of the biggest reasons to stick with legacy cobol applications is that,
often times, these applications grew organically over decades to encompass
business process for entire industries. There was never one single design
document or even goal. And hence the functionality of the systems are poorly
documented and only really understood by the cadre of users who use it from
day to day. Ie they are incredibly expensive or even impossible to replace.

Another point that's never made in discussions about cobol is how incredibly
"safe" it is, from a security perspective. Cobol is a lot like (an incredibly
verbose) assembler, all storage is statically allocated before the program
even starts. In cobol there in no runtime stack, and no dynamic memory
allocation. So no chance of buffer overflow attacks or trashing the stack.

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PaulHoule
COBOL has advanced features, such as an environment definition, and database
schema built into the language itself. Newer languages are just catching up.

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twobyfour
Define "obsolete"?

