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from the COBOL-is-often-fractionally-better dept.
https://medium.com/@bellmar/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
When we talk about COBOL the first question on everyone's mind is always Why are we still using it in so many critical places? Banks are still running COBOL, close to 7% of the GDP is dependent on COBOL in the form of payments from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The IRS famously still uses COBOL, airlines still use COBOL (Adam Fletcher dropped my favorite fun fact on this topic in his Systems We Love talk: the reservation number on your ticket used to be just a pointer), lots of critical infrastructure both in the private and public sector still runs on COBOL.
Why?
The traditional answer is deeply cynical. Organizations are lazy, incompetent, stupid. They are cheap: unwilling to invest the money needed upfront to rewrite the whole system in something modern. Overall we assume that the reason so much of civil society runs on COBOL is a combination of inertia and shortsightedness. And certainly there is a little truth there. Rewriting a mass of spaghetti code is no small task. It is expensive. It is difficult. And if the existing software seems to be working fine there might be little incentive to invest in the project.
But back when I was working with the IRS the old COBOL developers used to tell me: "We tried to rewrite the code in Java and Java couldn't do the calculations right."
[Ed note: The referenced article is extremely readable and clearly explains the differences between floating-point and fixed-point math, as well as providing an example and explanation that clearly shows the tradeoffs.]
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Monday September 16 2019, @05:13PM
Anybody can program. Not everybody can do it well. Something people forget; besides that, your IQ is like a power meter and no matter how big yours is, it goes down the harder you concentrate on tasks. A great programmer who sucks at some science is going to use up their IQ on the problem while an expert is going to use their IQ on the programming. It really depends upon the situation which one is going to do better. Complex languages like C++ that provide way too much bloat of options (or Perl with insane linguistic power) might entertain a pro programmer also lower their IQ thinking about the details. For systems work, those details ARE the work so it's not as horrible... but they work when the pro knows when to ignore all the feature bloat and work with the proper subset (and future Perl 6 gurus will make the language conform to the problem at hand and then use an even more niche subset. Will people notice the powerful potential? probably not...)