palisade

Then a disease will arrive that will make the entire population vanish because their immune systems never had to interact with anything.

The compiler did normally warn for data bounds checking, so I figured it would in this case. If that's not the case anymore then I'm wrong.

Not to be too macabre, but we need to transfer the knowledge while the people who have it are still alive, can remember and can teach others to pick up the torch. And, let us call it was it is, of those remain and still have the desire to make the effort to transfer that knowledge.

It is easy to look back on y2k and think well that wasn't a big deal, but the only reason it wasn't is because people tirelessly worked to stop it. It is a testament to their success.

Regarding y2k Robert Bemer tried to warn people in 1971, with 29 years left to go. And, Peter de Jager published his attention-getting article "Doomsday 2000," in 1993 (in Computerworld), with a mere 7 years left which finally put the fire under everyone's ass. Keep in mind, there were still many original COBOL programmers and mainframe experts left to talk to at that time. And, there was a lot less code to change back then than there is now.

Voting tabulation, insurance, utilities, administrative systems, banking, ATMs, travel, healthcare, social security, point of sale, IRS, pension funds, TACTICAL NUKES, hotel bookings and payroll programs. More than 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. For better or worse, it is the very bedrock of our modern society.

If you want to replace it with something that you want to maintain instead, that's fine too but we're running out of time.

"Danger, Will Robinson! DANGER!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU

"Listen the nothing will be here any minute. I will just sit here and let it take me away too. They look... like... big... strong hands.... Don't they?" https://youtu.be/symP4QT7wLU?feature=shared&t=24

I guess my post is getting misread as "just use cobol" when it was more of a XKCD-like reflection; e.g. why did we all do that / keep doing that. We done did Cobol, and Rust. And, one is "dead" but not really and now here we are.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I didn't say I wanted to code in it, though. I'd prefer in no particular order Kotlin, Python, Go, C++, Rust, Perl, C#, Java, Zig, etc. Anything really over COBOL myself. I'm part of the problem.

But, if I was hard up for money and wasn't getting nibbles for jobs? I could see getting into COBOL because there is a lot of money in it and always work available.

My statement stands though, we need to do better when designing the syntax of our languages. Cobol is disliked, yet simple and readable. What does that say about our new languages. How hated are our "new" language remnants going to be when few of us are longer around to maintain them 50 - 75 years from now? And, how easy are they going to be to pick up?

Addendum: I guess it won't matter if the singularity comes and just writes it all for us, of course. Then it will all just be machine code and we won't need these "only human" translation layers any longer.

Do they solve all the same problems? No, for example COBOL lacks a modern concept of concurrency within a single program. COBOL's concurrency features are based on task-level parallelism, which involves dividing a program into multiple tasks that can be executed concurrently.

Is it performant? Yes. COBOL is highly efficient particularly in handling large datasets and complex business logic and its compilers are optimized for reliability and speed.

Can it interface with native code? Yes.

Does it have a package manager? No.

Does it describe shape of data? No. Data structures in COBOL are defined using fixed-length records.

Note: I'm not a COBOL expert. I did learn it in college, though.

Yeah, there are fewer engineers in COBOL which is why it pays BIG bucks now. They desperately need someone to maintain that massive infrastructure that has been built up over 75 years that cannot be replaced easily or quickly.

It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more than 100 lines.

This was why Y2K genuinely scared everyone and was a very real problem. The only reason we can look back at it and laugh now is that an army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.

The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one wants to use it so it is "dead" but it runs everything that made the modern age possible.

RUST:

println!("Enter number: ");

let mut input_string = String::new();

io::stdin().read_line(&mut input_string).unwrap();

let number: i32 = input_string.trim().parse().expect("Please enter a valid number.");

let result = if number % 2 == 0 {

    "EVEN"

    "ODD"

println!("The number: {}", result);

COBOL:

display 'Enter number: '

accept number

if function mod(number,2) = 0

    move 'even' to result

    move 'odd' to result

display 'The number: ',result

I think understandably, everyone is concerned because it felt like an affront by MS against Linux. But, I don't think that was their thought process at all.

And, the misinformation surrounding the link to autism that turned out to be fabricated by a scientist who just wanted to be famous. Or, that time a company 'accidentally' sent the hpv vaccines to South America that included the highly undesirable side effect of sterilization that had already caused the vaccine to be banned from use state-side. Or, that time we weaponized the distribution of vaccines in Pakistan to find Bin Laden more quickly.

Note: I'm not a vaccine denier or avoider, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves with what the actual challenges are and why they exist.

"The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it."

You know, the line you had to skip a few paragraphs ahead of to find your quotes.

Licklider who established the Intergalactic Computer Network memo that started it all. And, who was heavily involved in ARPAnet and bringing in all the people involved including Baran and Davies. Specifically mentions ARPAnet Command and Control in his paper!

"It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...

At the beginning he says, "The ARPA Command & Control Research office has just been assigned a new task that must be activated immediately, and I must devote the whole of the coming week to it."

And, then goes on to say.

"It is necessary to bring this opus to a close because I have to go catch an airplane. I had intended to review ARPA’s Command-and-Control interests in improved mancomputer interaction, in time-sharing and in computer networks. I think, however, that you all understnad [sic.] the reasons for ARPA’s basic interest in these matters, and I can, if need be, review them briefly at the meeting. The fact is, as I see it, that the military greatly needs solutions to many or most of the problems that will arise if we tried to make good use of the facilities that are coming into existence."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Licklider_1963_-_Members_and_Aff...

It is strange the the article tries to start by saying it had nothing to do with Baran's research into bomb resilient switching. But, actually they relied heavily on his research and actually Davies roped him in when designing the early ARPA and Internet. Hence, it is based on his bomb resilient switching, and therefore was based on ideas that were meant to survive a nuclear strike.

"You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients. ... and [you were] the first to reduce it to practice." - Paul Baran to Davies

Davies also got his start at Tube Alloys project in UK and worked at NPL, in nuclear weapon related projects.

I guess you could argue that beyond that they didn't really think much about it further. But, I somehow doubt that they weren't thinking about it as they continued. Kahn was heavily involved in the project and he also created the Strategic Computing Initiative, which among its many other goals also funded supercomputing for large scale simulation of atomic bombs. A nuclear war was very much on the mind of everyone involved.

This whole article feels like a misinformation propaganda piece. For what purpose I don't know.

The website is registered in Reykjavik, Iceland and hosted in Oklahoma. Which doesn't really tell me much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_stick