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When I read such titles I feel sad.

In 2016 we are still talking about Cobol, which is spread in a relatively niche market and considered as a pillar in fields like banking, how can the object oriented paradigm be considered " past or even bad? It is the present and will be the future for at least the next 20 years, considering the number of billions lines of code. From a management perspective, such statements are not strong enough to be justified.

I find this sort of articles to be just bread and butter for codemonkeys, people who learn the most recent paradigm, technology or whatsoever and think that it's the key to happiness, or people who read for the first time a book like the ones from Bob Martin and feel they already know how to develop good software - or poems, as mentioned somewhere in the book - and list the bad things about other types of software architecture or design or whatever.



Cobol is certainly considered bad.


While I think that you are definitely right and that nowadays Cobol would probably not be the first choice for 98% companies out there, I think we should also consider that according to TIOBE ( http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index ) Cobol is one of the 20 most used languages in the world - and it's also thanks to it that we can use banks efficiently. Can we all say goodbye to Cobol? Go and ask those ones who program in such language - who make a s* load of money with it.

I personally could say goodbye to Assembly, as I only used it for learning purposes, I could say goodbye to Perl, because I don't use it and I don't like it, or I could say goodbye to Visual Basic - for other reasons. All these languages are extremely powerful, they still do their job today, although some are too low-level for our everyday applications, some are just in a process of replacement (like Cobol, of course). However, I tend to keep these opinions for myself.

"Saying goodbye" in such cases is a strong statement, inherently sensationalist and biased, therefore my criticism toward the title. In a field like computer science, you can't and shouldn't use such titles. Such a title shows already how biased you (the author) are.


Oh, you can make great money doing Cobol. Demand is niche, but supply is even smaller.

(My grandfather made very good money in the late 90s converting Cobol and assembly programs in banks and insurance companies to y2k.)


But good enough to be widely used for some of the worlds most important business processes such as payrolling and banking.


Just like PHP is widely used by one of the most important and successful Internet companies.

Legacy code bases don't make a language good.




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