Comment on Not mocking cobol devs but yall are severely underpaid for keeping fintech alive
frobeniusnorm@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I swear to god, companies are nowadays just picking the solution with the most buzzwords. Any compiler engineering student knows how to write a transpiler from one language to another, while getting this right is a cumbersome task, it still completly automated afterwards. Just hire a few compiler engineering phds and the job is done in at least half a year.
Look what i found after a quick google search:
yggdar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.
You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.
The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Also, isn’t COBOL extremely fast ? Which is not necessarily true for newer languages
ignotum@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Rust: am i a joke to you?
Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
I think that’s mostly because of the systems COBOL usually runs on, not so much because of the language
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
You’re probably thinking of Fortran, which is still used for hardcore number crunching in areas like physics.
jaybone@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just make the devs learn the language is they don’t know it already. What kind of shitty mid to senior dev can’t learn a new language in a reasonable amount of time.
abraxas@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I think it’s a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it’s C#. It’s not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other “why we use best practices” raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending.
In FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.