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Comment by tonysdg | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't you at least port your COBOL to C? It's also statically typed, compiled, there are high-performance libraries that support arbitrary levels of numeric precision (GNU GMP), and every engineer trained in the last 20 years at least has some C experience.

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That is a terrible idea from someone who doesn't know COBOL.

Programs in COBOL mostly don't need pointers and offer better type safety than C. They often used nested structures of records, which are a pain to represent in C. Language is also stricter when it comes to modularity.

Rewriting in C would make most COBOL programs worse.

Also, floating-point is really not the issue. What you in fact want, on the IBM Mainframe at least, is to move to hardware decimal floating-point (latest IEEE 754), which is way faster than IBM's packed decimal (fixed-point) system commonly used in COBOL.

Finally, legacy COBOL systems either have or not have bugs which cause certain edge-case behavior and this is really hard to reproduce in another system.

Your dream is reality! Gnu Cobol source translates to C and compiles that with the system c compiler. The c looks like some sort of bizarre assembler, so there's that.

every engineer trained in the last 20 years at least has some C experience.

I think that’s a massive exaggeration. Most people these days think JavaScript without a framework is “bare metal”.

One should be hesitant to call those people engineers.

One should be hesitant to label computer programmers as "engineers".

Gatekeeping is fun.

As someone whose degree title is “Software Engineering”, I totally agree we shouldn’t be called engineers. Crafters, sure. But almost none of us do stuff/standards that Engineers-as-a-protected-term do.

Firstly, it's not unjustified to say that someone who thinks vanilla JavaScript is "bare metal" obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. Secondly, as a software-engineer-in-training, I agree - software "engineering" doesn't have much in common with other engineering, but I think that's a good thing for software.

Could you imagine if software engineers DID do rigorous engineering practices?

It would be mayhem! Projects would just NEVER FINISH.

But when they do finish, it will stand the test of time!

One should hesitate on general principle.

Paranoia is fun!

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