S. Lott: Why Isn't COBOL Dead? Or Why Didn't It Evolve?

Here's part of the question:

Why didn't COBOL evolve more successfully?

FORTRAN, OTOH, has survived precisely because it--and more importantly, related tools, esp compilers--has evolved to solve/overcome many (certainly not all!) of the sorts of pain-points you describe, while retaining the significant performance edge that (IMHO, ICBW) prevents challengers (e.g., Python) from dislodging it for tasks like (e.g.) running dynamical models (esp weather forecasting).

In short, why is FORTRAN still OK? Why is COBOL not still OK?

Actually, I'd venture to say the stories of these languages are essentially identical. They're both used because they have significant legacy implementations.

There's a distinction, that I think might be relevant to the "revulsion factor."

Folks don't find Fortran quite so revolting because it's sequestered into libraries where we don't really have to look at it. It's often wrapped into SciPy. The GCC compiler system handles it and we're happy.

COBOL, however, isn't sequestered into libraries with tidy Python wrappers and Conda installers. COBOL is the engine of enterprise applications.

Also. COBOL is used by organizations that suffer from high amounts of technical inertia, which makes the language a kind of bellwether for the rest of the organization. The organization changes slowly (or not at all) and the language changes at an even more tectonic pace.

This is a consequence of very large organizations with regulatory advantages. Governments, for example, regulate themselves into permanence. Other highly-regulated industries like banks and insurance companies can move slowly and tolerate the stickiness of COBOL.

Also.

For a FORTRAN library function that does something useful, it's not utterly mysterious. There's often a crisp mathematical definition, and a way to test the implementation. There are no quirks.

For a COBOL program that does something required by law, there can still be absolutely opaque mysteries and combinations of features without acceptable unit test cases. This isn't for lack of trying. It's the nature of "application" vs. "subroutine."

The special case and exceptions have to live somewhere. They live in the application.

For FORTRAN, the exceptions are in the Python wrapper using numpy using FORTRAN.

For COBOL, the exceptions are in the COBOL  Somewhere.

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