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Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

Easy there. We're standing on the shoulders of those COBOL giants.

What's obvious in 2020 was cutting-edge and forward-thinking in 1960. The rude kids of 2080 may sneer at your best code circa 2020.

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Don't mean to brag, but I already sneer at 2020 code!

I've certainly found myself sneering at code I wrote just last week.

In an effort to be more efficient, I've begun sneering at it as I write it.

I just go m-x auto-sneer-mode and Emacs automatically sneers at my code as I write it!

I like to edit the source code to auto-sneer-mode.el in sneer mode, so it sneers at itself! Nothing more snarky than self-sneering code. I had to manually sneer by myself while writing it, to get it bootstrapped.

I just don't write any code to avoid the sneer!

A classic JIT sneerer.

Why not sneer proactively ahead of time?

We used to maintain multi-user machines with useful software preinstalled. It took tremendous post-deployment sneering to get from there to Docker.

We are not standing on the shoulders of COBOL. We are standing on the shoulders of ALGOL and LISP. Those languages influenced everything that came after in every field of computing. COBOL has had little influence outside of its silo.

We should absolutely respect the history of our field, but the mere fact that COBOL is old doesn't make it an important part of history.

That fact that the many industries, most importantly the financial industry heavily rely on it makes it an important part of history.

I agree cobol as a language is not particularly glamorous in terms of what it brought it computer science. I say this as a cobol dev, so I’m laughing, but it’s true: cobol sucks.

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