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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I really wish these big bulky enterprise and commercial solutions wouldn't prop up this technical debt. Things like ArcGIS an other $10k+ software packages have built in Python2 interpreters. If all of them decide to keep "supporting" py2, a ton of security updates are going to fall through the cracks or become non-uniform across tools.

They've literally had years and years to upgrade their tooling. But considering some of this enterprise crap still has support for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) we'll probably see Python2 in the wild well into 2030. Makes you wonder how much COBOL is still out there.

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As an alternative viewpoint, it's bizarre that we can't support these things. Mathematics textbooks from 400 years ago are relatively intelligible, and those from 100 years ago are easily readable. But with computer science, a domain which consists entirely of problems we ourselves invented, we've wedged ourselves into a situation where we are apparently so bad at computer language design (let alone systems engineering/systems architecture) that something surviving for a decade is frankly notable.

Programming languages are more like spoken languages than mathematical languages. They evolve fast. Programming languages also are versioned, something that's nonexistent and blurry in spoken languages.

There's no support for Latin in almost any software today and books in Latin can be read by a extremely small minority. Even a English speaker from the 1700s would have trouble with today's English.

Apples to oranges. I don't think you'd be as surprised if the statement were reworded to "the human brain has more flexibility in parsing to understand intent from text than a computer". The issue is very unlikely to be poor language design as, as you allude, people can parse old code just fine. The thing we're actually bad at is building computers that reason intent from content like we do.

What are you talking about "surviving for a decade?"

Python 2 was released in 2000 -- part of why Python 3 was called Python 3000, I believe.

perl code I wrote in 2001-2004 is still running in production today, and I don't think I'll ever need to port it to perl6/roku.

Money talks, and RedHat is a business like any other. If customers are willing to pay more than it costs to continue supporting it, why wouldn't they do that?

As to why companies can't move forwards: writing tests sucks. whether it's the scaffolding, or perfect is the enemy of the good, writing tests is harder than it wants to be, if someone hasn't put in the effort to set up the codebase to be ready to accept tests. writing tests are often skipped, especially in older codebases that predate today's culture of testing, and even tests are often wrongly skipped in favor of expediency. Thus refactoring or rewriting old codebases is fraught with fear that it will cause regressions.

> Makes you wonder how much COBOL is still out there.

The answer is "a lot". Brazil's largest banks still employ "Senior COBOL developers", to name just one example.

And rightfully so.

Tangent, sure, why not COBOL? COBOL in the cloud for example with Elastic Cobol:

https://www.heirloomcomputing.com/elasticcobol/

? I mostly just love the name.

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