
Old Languages Like COBOL Stick Around for Good Reasons - engineertorque
https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/why-cobol-is-still-used
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_bxg1
> They don’t want to break it by touching it.

It blows my mind that we haven't solved this problem yet given half a century.
That we're still so afraid of touching our code. COBOL may be COBOL, but who
among us can honestly say that things are categorically different in 2020?

It got me thinking about languages like Haskell that resist this kind of
breakage. And that got me thinking about why people don't use those languages
for mission-critical systems like these. Probably it's because they tend to be
unapproachable and their communities populated by language nerds, instead of
people who just want to get things working and keep them that way. And that
reminded me of this thing I saw a while back about finding a "simple subset"
of Haskell that could give you all the functional and type-checked benefits
without the dizzying theory:
[https://www.simplehaskell.org/](https://www.simplehaskell.org/)

I don't know what point I'm trying to make exactly; I just find it bizarre and
depressing that our business logic still has to be rewritten just because we
want to change platforms. That we still can't build systems that can safely be
upgraded piecemeal. I just don't get it. These feel like solvable, incredibly
valuable, problems. It can make a programmer feel nihilistic.

~~~
cannabis_sam
I used to build PHP-backends for 15 years, but for the last few years I’ve
switched to Haskell for exactly this reason.

(So I think you’re making a good point :)

