
COBOL turns 60: why it will outlive us all - mindcrime
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cobol-turns-60-why-it-will-outlive-us-all/
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maxharris
This is just Micro Focus astroturfing! They don't have a business in a world
where banks and government agencies have written their software in a modern
language.

Here's a comment I made a month ago about another thinly-veiled Micro Focus
press release:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20987206)

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godzillabrennus
Why would they undertake such a massive task if they don’t have the need?

It’s cheaper to pay for training so new hires can write obsolete languages on
IBM’s last innovative release (the AS400).

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Nohnce1
I work in fintech, and my company is switching over to Java. It's gonna take a
few more years, but they are implementing more than legacy code.

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greglindahl
That's exactly why "Java is the new Cobol" is an occasionally-heard slogan.

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tyingq
Something of a shallow look into why it's still around. Part of it is that
it's not just COBOL, but the ecosystem around it that makes it harder to port.
Porting over a COBOL program from MVS, OS/400, MPE, etc, also requires porting
over the surrounding stuff. Job schedulers, record (vs stream) based files,
monitoring, print formats, character encodings, 3270 screen formats, and so
on.

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asperous
Seems like a lot of that could be emulated or made part of a virtual machine

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tyingq
Technically, yes. Legally, no. See the Hercules emulator for example.

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xivzgrev
Zdnet writer: “why is COBOL still around?”

Cobol vendor: “well let me tell you how widely it’s still used”

Zdnet writer: “k thx.” _sends to editor_

It would’ve been way more interesting to get even one customer perspective,
say from a bank. Why do they still use COBOL? (Answer: it powers critical
infrastructure, it’s risky as hell to migrate, and the benefit isn’t worth the
cost right now vs investing elsewhere)

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dang
You don't like this COBOL article? Try this COBOL article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21288415)

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bdrhoa
It's COBOL, not Cobol. And I keep my COBOL textbook to ensure that I never
have to work in COBOL again. I'm certain that as soon as let that textbook,
I'll end up needing it.

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mindcrime
I originally wrote the headline as COBOL, but HN has some sort of "auto
headline munger" that munged it to Cobol. I see it's subsequently been set
back to COBOL, presumably by one of the mods.

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marktangotango
The point of this seems to be highlighting the micro focus cloud migration
marketing piece at the end. Besides some history, very little here.

