SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, @05:39PM (1 child)
Well, sort of. Sure, there are some languages that are bad for certain purposes but good for others. COBOL is bad for all purposes. The only reason to use it is because you have to. That was always true : even in the 60s the only reason it got any traction was because the Department of Defense mandated it (and it very much feels like a language designed to implement the processes of the 1960s military).
I'm old enough to remember the 80s and everyone hated COBOL then, too. It has twice the verbosity of Java, half the convenience of assembly, twice as many land mines as perl and half the power of BASIC. Its type system is designed to cause the maximum number of errors while also getting in the way whenever possible. The few features it has to make things easier instead end up forcing you to do things wrong.
Aside from joke languages [wikipedia.org], it's very close to the worst possible language.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 16 2019, @05:56PM
I remember the 70s.
I agree with everything you said about COBOL.
I hated COBOL. I think I mentioned it somewhere in this topic that I hated COBOL. (look for it) But looking at history I came to understand why it is. It was the path of least resistance.
Many things in life aren't perfect, but we live with them. How many people use Microsoft Windows? Internet Explorer?
So COBOL was used. Tons of software written in it. Now here we are. It is too big to simply replace overnight. (BTW, my other post I mentioned pointed out the prediction, which I disagreed with and was proven wrong, that COBOL would be here at the turn of the century.)
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.