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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

Do not underestimate COBOL. The latest version is from 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2014

How many commercial projects use COBOL 2014 though? I know Fortran 77 is still considered newfangled in some circles, even though Fortran 90, 95, 2003, 2008, 2015 exist. Same with C90, C++98, etc.

Net-new COBOL code is being written every day in the Enterprise world. I work on a team that's actively updating and maintaining a large COBOL codebase. The default standard that most people write to is COBOL-85.

Just because the language is old doesn't mean that it can't be the right tool for the right job. For batch processing-type tasks, there nothing better than COBOL on the mainframe. By default, COBOL doesn't allow for you to dynamically allocate memory. That makes it incredibly easy for the compiler and system to optimize the compiled code and make it run super fast.

COBOL is great for what it was designed for: processing data. If you want to read data from a file/database, process it in some way, and then save that data back to the database/another file, you can't do much better than what COBOL offers.

I'd love to know what "super fast" means. Are we talking about ETL jobs that would take hours? We run our batch file processing jobs in Python. It's not the fastest. But in a world where we can bring up more instances/containers to help process the work faster, I'd love to know how much faster COBOL is at these jobs that it'd be interesting to consider against the alternatives.

I code in Fortran 77/90 an average of 3 hours a day and I have a lot of fun! For science, the language is just vanishing and you can focus on the equations with at the end a crazy fast code.

The other 3 hours are in Python, Go and JS&cie.

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