News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals. Parent comment

Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by pastage on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @03:18AM (#43829545)
> due to young people not taking an interest in COBOL and Mainframes

Having only fleeting professional experience with COBOL during a summer my view of it is that it is a mix of dataanalyst job and programming. Where the programming is horrible and the report making is ok though archaic. As long as you modify processes already available it is not so bad, but the developer experience was horrible.

With all that said I actually liked ideas in COBOL but it is an extremely niche language that does not serve you at all in the real world.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by decimalenough on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @03:25AM (#43829590)
The "real world" of airline reservations, the world's financial infrastructure and basically anything involving hardcore real data processing runs on COBOL.

But yeah, if you're looking to code up a progressive web app or next blockbuster MMORPG, I wouldn't recommend COBOL.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by sofixa on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @03:47AM (#43829726)
The top (in the world) 2 airline reservation system Amadeus have ported everything to Kubernetes for years now. In fact they were among the top contributors to the project a few years back.

It's all a matter of age and maturity. Nobody starting an airline, or financial company, or "hardcore data processing" today even bothers considering a mainframe or COBOL.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by 8fingerlouie on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @04:37AM (#43830037)
In fact, starting over is often the thing that is the easiest to accomplish instead of porting 50 years of legacy code.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by oblio on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @05:51AM (#43830493)
At least as much mission critical software runs on C++, Java, and of course, plain old C.

I wouldn't portray Cobol to be some sort of magic "hardcore" pixie dust for anything.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S.... by pastage on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @06:15AM (#43830664)
Fair point! From a personal perspective it was about interfacing with the real world like parsing data, bitbanging or writing drivers. I actually have no problem with doing BI web apps with COBOL.
[ Parent | on HN ]