Comment on If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Most likely reason they (and many others, including banks) still use it: Security. There are probably billions of vulnerabilities for everything and billions of people able to hack to some degree. I wonder if there even is some as400 hacker 😁 Also you can’t just decide to become one now, because you can’t simply download a compiler and emulator. You need access. And even if you managed that, those things are never online, so you’d need to be physically near. Name a more secure thing.
Besides that shit just works. The more complex you make it, the more errors could occur. Really critical operations can’t have that.
lost_faith@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Only draw back is getting replacement parts when they go down.
I remember an old Undergrads ep where Gimpy was at a pc war games/hacker camp and when he tried to hack in to the opponents systems they were using like 10 yr old macs (at the time 2001 was when the series aired) and he couldn’t
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Not only that. Finding coders will be harder and harder too. As said, it’s not trivial to “now i learn this language”. And the youth surely doesn’t see any reason to picking this ancient fossil of yesteryear :)
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
The hard part is figuring out all of the tricks that were used to squeeze out every last bit of performance from ancient hardware and deciphering over half a century of updates.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Oh yes, and this too. “Modern” coders mostly forgot the art (necessity) of optimizing. Just because we have it plenty.