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A comment on Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024). Parent comment

Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by jokoon on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @05:26AM (#44308177)
This reminds me of rust: even if rust will be widespread in 10 or 20 years, it will not really displace C++.

Although I need a engineering explanation as to why COBOL is still alive after all those years, because any tech cannot live forever.

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Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by fsloth on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @07:15AM (#44308835)
Can’t live forever?

Latin is still going strong as well as water pipes (oldest being several millenia old).

Hard to predict which innovations remain resilient. The longer they stick around the more ”Lindy-proof” they are.

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Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by jt2190 on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @07:58AM (#44309094)
The explanation for COBOL is not an engineering one, but an economics one: “It’s cheaper to train a programmer to use COBOL than it is to rewrite the codebase in <language>.” (Perhaps LLMs might change the economics here.)
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Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by leptons on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @10:59AM (#44310497)
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" also applies here.

There is also no guarantee that whatever new language you port the COBOL code to won't also be seen as obsolete in a few years. Software developers are a fickle bunch.

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Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by 0points on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @06:01AM (#44308360)
> COBOL

Was popular in the 60s in fintech, so banks, ATM:s and related systems went digital using it.

Those systems are still running.

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Re:Why JPEGs Still Rule the Web After 30 Years (2024) by graealex on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @09:27AM (#44309708)
Although you can do a bit of Ship-of-Theseus philosophy on those COBOL systems. After every software component has been rewritten multiple times and every hardware has died and subsequently got replaced, all that's left is the decision to stick with COBOL, not the fact that it's a legacy system built in the 60s.
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