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Comment by quincunx | Hacker News Reader

| keep in mind that picking Java over Cobol for banking software in 90s retrospectively turned out to be the right choice

Is the Java written in the 90's still the same Java written today? I feel the mentioned Lindy effect equally applies to dialect. C++ today is radically different to C++ from the 90's. I'd venture COBOL from the 90's is likely quite similar to COBOL today.

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Looking at the Wikipedia page for Cobol 2002 and 2014, the last two major releases, it looks like they've gained features such as Object Oriented Programming, Recursion, data types like Booleans, pointers, and user-defined functions. So I'm going to bet modern COBOL looks totally different to that of the 90's!

I spent ~5 years working on a COBOL compiler. In practice, production COBOL compilers pick and choose which parts of the standard they choose to implement based on customer demand, and there's not a lot of demand for most of the new stuff. To a first approximation, almost all COBOL code is legacy code in maintenance mode, and I would guess that a significant fraction of COBOL running today has barely been touched since the 90s, if not earlier.

I'm still waiting for concurrent COBOL...

PERFORM x CONCURRENTLY WITH y BUT NOT WITH z.

  000100     MOVE 4 TO reference-count ATOMIC IF reference-count EQUAL TO 3.

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