Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdata. I work for a top 10 bank. The mainframe isn't going away here. We're investing in new development, new tools, and just (last 2 years or so) had a hiring spree to support those efforts. I am also very familiar with strategy at several other peer banks (they're doing the same thing), a number of the telcos (same) and 2 of the major airlines (who will look at you like you're insane if you suggest they get rid of their mainframe).

I've been hearing "mainframes are dead" since the 1980s. The market for them has dramatically changed, but by the same token there's just more people in IT who have no clue what the mainframes do from a business perspective, so "obviously" it's a dead end.

View on HN

To someone going into IT or programming at a young age (so, not me), would you recommend them to get into COBOL and mainframes? Will it be a career option for 10+ years?

Cobol is alive the same way Latin is. Unless you're sure you can get a job in the Vatican you're screwed if you learn it.

I understand and agree with your point but hey, I got a lot of benefit from learning Latin, arguably more than I got for learning Lisp (which was is what I used for the first 10 years of my career. It was a fun and quite lucrative period).

For graduates of my (very small) high school, Classics was the number one choice of college major and though I'm not in close touch with all of them I never heard any of them claim that they had made a mistake.

Cobol is sort of like Lisp* in that regard: the options are quite limited, but as the supply is too you'll probably do better than fine financially.

* wow is it painful to write that.

Lisp is interesting because it always has a first mover advantage in any field, i.e. I can code up something that does 80% of what I want in 10% of the time of any other language. Cobol's only use is that it's entrenched.

Which is why I used the vatican comparison.

In a nutshell, Cobol fails to inspire throngs of youngsters to write "toy Cobol" implementations.

It is also relatively rare for new languages cite Cobol as an inspiration for any of their features.

Cobol has a feature whereby dissimilar structures can be assigned. The structure members which have the same names are identified between the structures and the data is moved accordingly. Or something like that. A programming language which has such a thing could claim to have had that inspired by Cobol.

If I ever add that to TXR Lisp, I will be sure to drop a Cobol reference into the documentation.

I might have learned about this via Knuth; I think there is a mention of it in some passage in TAOCP.

> Cobol has a feature whereby dissimilar structures can be assigned. The structure members which have the same names are identified between the structures and the data is moved accordingly. Or something like that.

This horrifies me on several levels, though I suppose it could be considered a sort "cast to a superclass".

It seems to make sense in data-oriented programming. Say you want to create an invoice from a purchase_order or something. They have the same the order number, items, and figures. Just assign one to the other (or use it as a template for construction) to get the common values in, and fill in the rest.

> I might have learned about this via Knuth; I think there is a mention of it in some passage in TAOCP.

Indeed, see Volume 1, section 2.4 (Multilinked Structures). Page 426 has the example of the statement “MOVE CORRESPONDING DATE OF SALES TO DATE OF PURCHASES”, which, if I understand correctly, means something like “for each field foo in Purchases.Date, copy Purchases.Date.foo into Sales.Date.foo”.

The discussion is in the context of what kinds of data structures would be needed to compile such statements, which I guess makes sense considering that the original publisher offer for TAOCP was to write about everything a programmer would need to know to write a (60s-era) compiler.

(Coincidentally: I've started attending an online meetup that someone is running for reading TAOCP—we usually read about four pages in the two hours—and this is the very topic that we're going to read tomorrow.)

Unless your job is to teach Latin :). Quite a few schools around the world are teaching Latin or even Ancient Greek.

Are Latin and Ancient Greek dead? Ostensibly yes. But not useless. Besides teaching, there is a tremendous amount of books and texts written in Latin and Ancient Greek. To study them, one would invariably need to learn the language.

Much of that heritage has been translated into modern languages.

I believe this comment betrays a mean ignorance of philology -- a discipline to which I'd expect most hackers would be sympathetic, at least insofar as the art of n-way merges may apply, and a vain commitment to the search for (optimal) objective truth.

Texts from the ancient world are handed down to us not from on high, or a single authoritative source (please consider the problem of duplication prior to computers or mimeographs), so considerable effort and erudition is entailed in comparing sources, filling in lacunae (here's a true warrant for what most consider a sesquipedelian word), all of which is predicated on perusing (in vain) an intuition for "pure et clare latine" and a hard-nosed insistence on _attested sources_ on matters of usage and expression.

I treasure, uncountably, the continuity afforded by training new generations in "antique" languages and dialects. It addresses a much deeper and more valuable problem than shitting out the next side-hustling platform.

Loquendi ars latine vivendius quam lingua ista, ut mihi videtur. Non doctus sum (et plurima menda facio faciamque), et clare non dives causae haec lingua, at vita mea bene ornatur a hac lingua.

The following is hearsay based on a few people I know in that field, so take it with a grain of salt.

These days, most companies seem increasingly resigned/accepting of the fact that they're not going to find young, dynamic COBOL programmers in the wild. On top of that, old-school COBOL has a knack for creating idiosyncratic software architectures. Learning how some particular monstrosity was taped together is more important than the language itself, which is brain-dead simple. And there are few such COBOL codebases out there in the wild to read.

The result is a move towards hiring and training good programmers in-house, quite counter to the general trend in the industry. Which makes for good job security but also makes it hard to enter directly.

System Z is not just COBOL. C/C++, etc and Linux has run over there for years.

If I could go back 30 years, I’d have made more money, slept better and would have more hair on Z. Not that I can say for a new generation but now that everyone is a “full stack” developer and the stack changes every few years, I’d still prefer longer term niches if I was 22 again.

> If I could go back 30 years, I’d have made more money...

Compared to webdev? I'm very skeptical. The following scenario seems more likely:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26431085

Anecdote too. I work for a large bank too, and >95% of our business has now moved off the mainframe. Took about 8 years to migrate.

I’m not savvy on the costs, but I think the main benefit of ditching the mainframe is you can start using the IT tools, expertise, workflows, languages, frameworks, best practices etc. that 99% of the world is using.

With the mainframe, you’re in sort of a shielded of nook of the software world, where everything is fast and stable but also juuust a little different.

That doesn't make it thriving though. It's a niche that continues to get smaller, albeit at a very slow rate.

Their anecdata beats your unsourced generalization.

No, mine is anecdata too, just more of it. And neither wins because there's actual data out there about the size and velocity of the mainframe market. I just don't much care to look it up every time someone makes an unfounded declaration that mainframes are dead. And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap.

I was saying your anecdata beats the other guy. I definitely agree the mainframe ain't dead.

> And, since we're keeping score, zero content snark is bottom of the heap.

That's just hurtful, man.

I think the difference is that the mainframe isn’t going anywhere and the large companies themselves have been thriving and will likely continue to do so. My employer has a number of them and they work great although it’s challenging to find the developers. If it was my decision to migrate I’d be hesitant because it seems as though infrastructure is priced low enough to convince people to switch but then will likely creep up over time in either prices or lock-in.

I don't dispute that; every niche has a growth phase and a decline phase. See: Minicomputers or RISC workstations. However, given a nearly 60 year run so far, and an expectation that there's a couple more decades of life it it, we should be so lucky if whatever niche we work in 'fails to thrive' like that.

The replacement for a RISC workstation was an Intel one serving the same role for the same kind of customer. The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.

> The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.

Datacenter-scale compute on non-proprietary platforms (e.g. leveraging OCP standards and best practices, which have been developed w/ significant input from FAANG and 'cloud' vendors) can easily tackle any mainframe workload. The implied path is obvious.

Yes, and you can see the mainframe origins in the modern cloud. It was funny to see the predecessor to Kubernetes (Borg) had a language that was even a wink and a nod to JCL called BCL that then evolved into Kubernetes's resource config files.

That being said, it takes a massive commitment and pretty much a rewrite from scratch to achieve a jump from mainframe to modern DC. You need to embrace individual node failure and that's not something you can just hack in.

Can you provide an example of a company that migrated their mainframe based highly-available transactions oriented workload, to what you mention?

This is actually a good comment - look at a datacenter and squint, and tell me - is it not justa a new mainframe?

AWS, Azure and GCP are all proprietary, and all are producing larger and larger servers and VMs. They are basically rentable, virtualised mainframes at this point

Also note Apple is transitioning their Unix workstation line back to RISC.

Yeah, RISC is good. RISC architecture is going to change everything! (according to Apple, ofc. /s)

Wasn’t Nathan Myhrvold spouting this continuously at Microsoft in the 80’s that RISC was going to take over imminently? While that’s more likely presently than it ever was then, it still isn’t clear that it is even close to happening is it?

The only reason it failed is because there was little incentive to port software away from x86.

Most of us didn't consider writing cross-platform software back then and the few who did were writing software for Unix, not Windows, and that because there wasn't a single dominant OS (Unix was a fuzzy target) and binary architecture you could write for, so you had to think about portability.

Oddly enough, there was a lot of cross-platform work on games in the 80's because the home computer market was very fragmented.

Thanks for this informative response!

haha, thanks Dade

same role, across European banking sector.

Key theme is slimming down the mainframe to bare basics, then take out either batch, or DB2, and then see to pull the trigger on the rest, 6y horizon...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com