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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm just imagining the level of jaw dropping and brain exploding that would have gone on had that same headline been published in 1998.

Obviously at this point almost three decades into the internet era no one really cares. We all know that "somewhere" old COBOL code is running, but in practice the companies managing the bulk of data for society didn't even exist before Y2K. Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

But... yeah. Linux is now an official heir to the S/360. We've made it. Finally.

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> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

I can assure you that’s not correct, as I work in an enterprise that has plenty of unmaintainable COBOL still running, though they’ve supplemented it with lots of really bad .NET code more recently.

I too have seen lots of badly written .NET code out in the wild.

However, as with most languages, that is more a measure of the quality of the developer, than the quality of the language.

As a C++ developer now writing C# using .NET that new language and framework are a pleasure to work with.

> However, as with most languages, that is more a measure of the quality of the developer, than the quality of the language.

No, it’s more a measure of the quality of the development organization and process. The quality of individual developers is a factor here, but not the only one and often not the limiting one on software quality (and particularly often not on, e g., whether or not business requirements and system design are documented in a useful way to support maintenance and change analysis.)

There are lots of fairly common institutional factors at the kinds of shops that also tend to have lots of COBOL legacy code still running which also tend to result in instant-legacy code independent of platforms. They also have common in institutional patterns that tend to have platforms like Java and .NET.

This is not an indictment of Java or .NET as platforms, or of the individual developers in those environments.

Quite right — and to the extent that the blame goes to any individual developers, that comes back to the organization: do they pay well, offer a good working environment, etc.? One bad hire, sure, it happens but if it’s repeating that’s structural.

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

Sadly this is entirely untrue. What's happening in practice is they're still running COBOL and they're paying some woefully underpaid and underappreciated developers to write PHP ("Zend Core") for System-i.

This allows companies to run web applications on these aging systems.

I know that Mono for i, at least, is the result of an IRC bet between a couple of hobbyists about whether it was technically possible. I wouldn't be surprised if the PHP port was similar

Mono's port was done on their own initiative. Zend Server is, however, an IBM supported product. The same goes for e.g. node.js where IBM ported all of V8 to ppc64. (There is a community version of PHP released in 2019, but the commercial version precedes this)

This same work has proved useful in running chromium on ppc64le/Linux, even if I think running node.js on IBM i sounds ridiculous ;)

Plenty of jobs for remote COBOL devs in the 120-160k range, still. I wouldn’t call “live-where-you-want” at 150k/year woefully underpaid. That affords a great living in a lot of America. ‘Specially if you take two.

I wasn't talking about remote COBOL devs.

Pay for PHP devs, even on these systems is generally lower and a lot of the work is in Europe where developer pay is half.

COBOL working on Red Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes:

https://developer.ibm.com/technologies/systems/videos/gettin...

> We all know that "somewhere" old COBOL code is running, but in practice the companies managing the bulk of data for society didn't even exist before Y2K. Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

Not quite. I'd suggest that there are still many trillions of dollars worth of people's money still managed in COBOL on mainframe core banking systems. Certainly the "big 4" banks in Australia all still have such systems in production (though they also have java systems)

Disclosure: I have worked for a few banks.

> I'm just imagining the level of jaw dropping and brain exploding that would have gone on had that same headline been published in 1998.

I worked at IBM at the time and we had internal-use-only versions of a lot of major IBM AIX/Unix software running on Linux by 1998. Our experiments with running it directly on big iron started around then too. At least in my area most of the engineers were moving from X terminals to Linux desktops at that point so porting the software they were working on was inevitable.

> Everyone with unmaintainable COBOL has long since migrated to really bad Java code instead.

Unfortunately, not true. Most of the companies decided it was too much time and/or money to do that.

Sounds like another opportunity to extract millions of dollars from hard-headed customers that are 20 years behind

1998 was a bit early, but I could easily have imagined it any time after 2000. I'm frankly surprised it has taken this long.

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