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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @07:54PM
And SQL. But the notion of some non-technical business specialist writing their own queries in SQL would be laughable today. These languages all date from an era when it was commonly believed that the hard part of programming was the syntax. And it's not a surprise, many non-programmers today still think that. But that's as absurd as the notion that the hard part of being a lawyer is the Latin. We now know that not only is syntax not the hard part, but these languages are the opposite of helpful : it's important to keep code concise, and to make the language efficiently represent the problem. "English-syntax" languages make both of those things worse.
In hindsight, this is obvious. Natural languages are for talking to humans, and computers do not work like humans. But in the 1950s, nobody realized just how different they are.
Nobody blames Henry Ford for not including seat belts and power steering, but that doesn't mean there's any reason to drive a Model T today except for historical interest.