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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:48:30 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 29/09/2024 21:00, rbowman wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 05:42:15 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 29 Sep 2024 01:28:01 -0400, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>
>>> And COBOL is STILL with us, just under the skin. Lots of those 60s pgms
>>> writ by narrow-tie horn-rim-glasses Dilberts STILL doing their thing.
>>
>> They are disappearing, one way or the other. Companies that are still
>> insisting on sticking to that legacy code gradually going out of
>> business or being acquired, and having that technical-debt-ridden stuff
>> superseded by more modern stuff from the parent company ...
>>
>> Do you think PayPal, Ebay or TradeMe use COBOL code to manage their
>> financial transactions? Of course not.
> 
> How many government agencies, financial institution and so forth do you
> think DON NOT have reams of legacy COBOL?
> 
I suspect PayPal and Ebay actually do still use COBOL somewhere
The investment represented by 5-10 man  years of COBOL back in 1975 is a 
lot more than the machine to run it on today, and the glue software to 
integrate it into whatever software muddle companies use today.

My brush with financial software suggest that it is (or was 15 -20 years 
aqo) run on Oracle databases, by and in Oracle aligned software data 
centres. In short the code development and the data is outsourced to a 
big secure data centre

Oracle had a version of COBOL (PRO COBOL) that is able to call SQL 
statements.

I think it is still supported.

They also have a FORTRAN that can interface to it. What better place to 
put gigabytes of scientific data than an Oracle database?

And scientists still use FORTRAN

Now as far as new code is concerned, COBOL is still being written. But 
my nephew who writes banking software in Australia says he uses Java mostly.
A friend who does that uses C++

I've written database based software in PHP, and C. As a web application.

"about 240 billion lines of COBOL are in use today, and about 5 billion 
lines of COBOL code are written each year, claims IBM"

....a random google found.

There are huge FORTRAN libraries around that have taken years to write.
COBOL and FORTRAN are not hard languages to learn, especially for non 
computer nerds. And they work and are well supported.
Why NOT carry on using them?



-- 
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They 
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher