The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by stack_framer on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:25AM (#46584423)

Funny that he mentions people not pivoting away from COBOL. My neighbors work for a bank, programming in COBOL every day. When I moved in and met them 14 years ago, I wondered how much longer they would be able to keep that up.

They're still doing it.

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by bossyTeacher on Monday January 12, 2026 @02:17AM (#46585149)

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by bryanrasmussen on Monday January 12, 2026 @02:50AM (#46585352)

it sounds like these people are staying solvent as long as the market stays irrational.

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by webdevver on Monday January 12, 2026 @05:34AM (#46586577)

to be fair, that cobol program has been working for probably 30 years (maybe even longer than that) - thats unusually reliable and long-lived for a software project.

the only real contender in this regard is the win32 api, and actually that did get used in enterprise for a long time too before the major shift to cloud and linux in the mid 2010s.

ultimately the proof is in the real-world use, even if its ugly to look at... id say, even as someone who is a big fan of linux, if i were given a 30 year old obscure software stack that did nothing but work, i would be very hesitant to touch it too!

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by generic92034 on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:55PM (#46591867)

> the only real contender in this regard

I would like to add the business core functions of SAP R/3 (1992). Much of the code created for it in the early 90s still lives in the current SAP S/4HANA software.

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by WorldMaker on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:31PM (#46594571)

It still needs continual software maintenance though. The developers still making their money in COBOL make it because it doesn't just keep working untouched. (Just about no software does.)

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Re:The Next Two Years of Software Engineering by stg22 on Monday January 12, 2026 @06:40PM (#46595676)

There is a great deal of death in a language.

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