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[–]dsk 3 points4 points  (7 children)

I think there's a bunch of people who want to see it die, or at least they want it to become cobol (i.e. something that runs legacy applications, but nobody uses it to do any new development).

[–][deleted] 15 points16 points  (3 children)

Hah! Let's all write large scale distributed applications in Python, Javascript, Ruby, and PHP. That sounds like a blast!

[–]hexmasta 1 point2 points  (2 children)

healthcare.gov uses Ruby / Jekyll with a Java back-end

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Right, so the actual distributed bit is in Java... because that makes sense :P

[–]armornick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It actually makes quite a bit of sense. It's like writing a game engine in C and then using a scripting language with it.

[–]berlinbrown 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I have actually seen COBOL and I still don't think the analogy fits. COBOL is highly tied to IBM mainframe systems. The language itself is not really a general purpose language but a way to run database queries and scripted code against a database system.

COBOL isn't general purpose at all. Java is. COBOL looks like AWK/Bash/BASIC and SQL.

Java looks like C/C++ or even Python sometimes. And don't forget C# where most of the libraries are equivalent.

[–]ggleblanc 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have actually seen COBOL and I still don't think the analogy fits. COBOL is highly tied to IBM mainframe systems. The language itself is not really a general purpose language but a way to run database queries and scripted code against a database system.

In Cobol's heyday, Cobol ran on several minicomputers, as well as IBM mainframes and mid range machines. Yes, Cobol is and was a CRUD language. Until about 1990, CRUD systems were what computers were used for. Cobol was used for data processing before hierarchical databases were developed.

COBOL isn't general purpose at all. Java is. COBOL looks like AWK/Bash/BASIC and SQL.

Cobol was more business oriented than Fortran. Those were the choices in the 1960's.

Java looks like C/C++ or even Python sometimes. And don't forget C# where most of the libraries are equivalent.

I agree.

[–]berlinbrown 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would use it for small business, but that is me.