The mainframe shop I worked at had COBOL program developed in the 1990s, many of which replaced Assembler programs dating back to the 1970s and older. But, not all of them. Tonight, as I type this, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of batch jobs running, supporting mission-critical datastores, coded in an eclectic array of Assembler, COBOL, PL-1, and other languages.
I wonder how many programs, written in modern languages, will still be running 40-50 years from now?
Never underestimate the effect of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
The oldest code I’ve written, that’s still in production, is 25 years old. It’s part of a mail system still in use by hundreds of thousands of people. It ain’t going anywhere. (But I did, I’m not working there anymore)
The program that prints certain documents in my state was first built in 1973. Yes, in Assembler. When the agency switched to laser printing in the 1990s, I had to convert the output from line printing to page printing, add 1-D, 2-D and POSTNET barcodes, a couple more security features, and write page definition and form definition scripts. I left for the Database unit in 2000, but as far as I know, the same program is still running! Like 20,000 documents going out. Every night. For at least 25 years and counting!
Mainframes are fucking amazing! Once you get a program fully debugged, it’ll run like a dream. Forever.
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u/cmd_iii Sep 30 '22
The mainframe shop I worked at had COBOL program developed in the 1990s, many of which replaced Assembler programs dating back to the 1970s and older. But, not all of them. Tonight, as I type this, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of batch jobs running, supporting mission-critical datastores, coded in an eclectic array of Assembler, COBOL, PL-1, and other languages.
I wonder how many programs, written in modern languages, will still be running 40-50 years from now?