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| | Ask HN: Why COBOL is not hip anymore? | |
4 points by maxpert on June 18, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 10 comments
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| So I've been looking into various modern languages and have been working in few of them. While new kids like Golang, Rust, Kotlin, Crystal, and Elixir are getting great traction in today's world of writing business oriented web applications, something that was designed to be expressive is not getting enough traction. There are no mainstream languages that are inspiring their syntax from COBOL (like Elixir or Crystal did). There are no popular frameworks, no famous community or a famous company (exclude legacy) that is promoting COBOL. Looking at sample code listings I can see a huge potential where businesses can write really expressive code. Yet I don't see somebody like say Salesforce, or IBM pushing it. Why? |
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There was a really great COBOL programmer back in the 1990’s who was making piles of money hand over fist. But she was terribly overworked, and getting really tired of slaving away on Y2K fixes.
From all her experience fixing mission critical code, she was becoming increasingly worried that civilization was going to collapse due to Y2K bugs.
After all that hard work, she never wanted to look at another line of COBOL ever again, she was just so sick and tired of it.
So she signed up with Alcor, and had herself cryonically frozen in 1999, leaving behind explicit instructions that she was to be revived after civilization had finally put itself back together again.
Time passed by, Y2K came and went, but to her, it was only the dreamless flickering of an instant.
Finally she woke up, in a clean futuristic hospital room, surrounded by inscrutable machines that go “ping” and strangely dressed doctors with funny accents and weird hairdos.
She was just so happy to be alive that she proclaimed “Thank you so much for bringing me back to life! I am eternally grateful, and in your debt! Is there anything I can do to repay you? And by the way, what year is it?”
Then one of the doctors smiled at her cheerfully and said, “Yes, actually! It’s the year 9999, and the records indicate that you’re a COBOL programmer...”