COBOL is the asbestos of programming languages
2026-03-19 17:48:58.344729+01 by
Dan Lyke
2 comments
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.
[ related topics:
Interactive Drama Perl Open Source Aviation Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment hubris
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2026-03-19 19:48:17.607114+01 by:
markd
I'm paywalled out of the article. Wondering how much of the "COBOL is bad mmmkay" story is due to it not
being trendy enough to encourage younguns to learn and enter the industry using it. At the large scale
museum I hang out with, we've got some IBM mainframers who did a freakton of COBOL in the day, and it
sounds like a pretty cool language once you get into it. And IBM's dedication to backward compatibility
makes everybody else look like amateurs. (One of the volunteers has a BASIC compiler he built in 1982, and
it is still working great on some of the early 2000s hardware that we have)
#Comment Re: made: 2026-03-19 22:02:04.370882+01 by:
Dan Lyke
The article is mostly about scoping and how it manages (or doesn't) complexity. That it's
a language that seemingly is focused on readability, but that notion of what's readable
came before we had good understandings of how locality of reference and control flow make
for systems that can be understood as a whole.
And that, combined with the optional words in the language and various other factors (I
remember 150 lines of boilerplate) meant that writing "good" code became a matter of
discipline.
Discipline that the language didn't enforce.
I sometimes wonder about BASIC, how approachable it was. How as I was learning to program,
at some point I started implementing things like temporary variables on a stack because I
couldn't track what variables I'd used for what in my head any more.
How Pascal was kind of a step forward, but once C came along the world opened up because
suddenly pointers made sense (in a way they didn't in Pascal), and...
(And then there was 360 assembly language, that made me go "whoah, they really architect
assuming there's no recursion, by convention, WTF?")
...anyway, I'm an old, and I'm frustrated that the kids these days throw their abstraction
libraries around without understanding WTF is actually happening, and...
I often think about my house, and how many things I've done thinking I could just do it
once, for 50 years, and never worry about it again, and how fast those things that were
done on a 20 or 30 year schedule are coming back around, and it's making me re-think
software systems, and how we approach building and maintaining them.
We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your
comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel
they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine,
if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't
try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted
if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and
more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave
such ridicule in place.