Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xelxebar | Hacker News Reader

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What a perceptive question!

Learning boring technology and invisible infrastructure definitely can pay dividends. I don't think it's worth learning in isolation, but if you also engage in the relevant communities (think mailing lists, in-person conferences, company events, etc.) then the effort pays good dividends IME.

I'm a bit biased, but I recommend looking at APL[0]. For one, it has a legacy almost as old as COBOL, with large pieces of European infrastructure running on the language. At the same time, it's cutting edge in both performance and the software architecture principles it encourages. Heck, APL even runs on GPUs these days [1], boasting a solid route for learning modern GPU programming as well.

Also, the company behind the leading APL implementation these days, Dyalog[0], has some of the friendliest outreach around, and their yearly conferences are some of my favorites to attend.

Disclaimer: I am kind of in love with APL as a greenfield development language. Feel free to email me personally if you have any questions. Address is in my HN profile.

[0]:https://dyalog.com/

[1]:https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns

Thank you for your response. I was curious to know whether COBOL (and all the other languages from that era) still had real professional value worth seriously exploring. I’ve often been interested in older languages for learning purposes, but I actually rushed through APL too quickly. I had looked at some source code and initially thought it was an exotic programming language because of the many special characters I saw. But I was wrong—this language is quite well-designed and powerful. I'll take a closer look at it; it also seems interesting.

In the past, it was possible to create truly innovative languages, but that is very rarely the case now. We are constantly bound by industrial standards, from syntax to functionality.

APL is a far cry from cobol, the only commonality is both are old and considered obsolete by some.

OP mentions "old languages" like COBOL and Fortran, which first appeared around 1959 and 1957, respectively. APL showed up around 1966, so it's in the same ballpark era-wise.

More to the point of OP's question, however, is the market share these languages command. I've read estimates that about half of banking software is still running on COBOL, somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion SLOC or so. Fortran still sees active use in high performance libraries for scientific computing and supercomputer architectures, with solid C interop. Heck, a new Fortran spec even came out in 2023!

In other words, COBOL and Fortran both still command significant market niches. APL, similarly, has on the order of several billion SLOC running around in financial and healthcare institutions, not to mention a long tail of data science applications. This is mostly true in the Nordic countries.

APL the language is still alive and growing, getting yearly updates. Better yet, APL has a SotA compiler that can both host on and target GPUs. It's language model maps cleanly to hardware, which significantly eases reasoning about performance. At the same time it remains a high-level language where one can write production, performant, applications in just mere hundreds of SLOC, all while remaining pleasant to maintain and extend in my experience. Try saying that about any other language you know.

That is to say, any accusations that these languages are "obsolete" are a bit naïve, IMHO. There are solid careers to be had as developers in each of their industries, without having to grind your soul to a pulp trying to find employment in IT just to end up writing yet another CRUDy SPA.

As somebody who has written both COBOL and APL, I can assure you that they are both obsolete.

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