Flutterby™! : COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages

Interesting take: Wired: COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages. I don't think it's super necessary to read the article, because the author summarized it really nicely on the Fediverse: Zeb Larson @zeblarson@hcommons.social

I published this for Wired today and I'm really happy with it. You might think that I have a categorical dislike of COBOL, but actually I don't. I think instead that it's really important to think carefully about the computing systems you build, because changing them can be *really* painful. I wrote this thinking in no small part about vibe- coding and how we'll be stuck with systems that nobody really understands, and if they get large enough they will be incredibly difficult to unravel.

That thing about "the value of your code is how easy it is to modify it" is landing pretty hard these days. And with LLM assisted coding, I kinda feel like we're in some of the same spaces as large Perl codebases, yes, you can argue that it's quick and easy to just re- implement it, but if you're working with something that deeply encodes decades of contractual meaning then what goes on around that code, how you keep the history, how you verify that your best customer isn't suddenly gonna be super pissed off (or, worse, pissed off a year later after they figure out that you started billing them wrong), there's a whole lot of process that needs to get wrapped around that that's super expensive to unpack.