Programming

17507 readers

9 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Cobol Has Been "Dead" For So Long, My Grandpa Wrote About It (wumpus-cave.net)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/programming

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It naturally contains some of the buzzwords of the time, such as fourth-generation programming language (4GL). If you’re not familiar with that term, suffice it to say that the Wikipedia page lists several examples, and Cobol has outlasted most of them.

Lots of 3GL outlived most 4GL languages, C, C++, C# Java, Ruby, Python, and even newer languages like Rust and Go are 3GL. In fact so did plenty of 2GL (assembly languages).

Programming language generations are about usage and level of abstraction not about being obsolete.

[–] sukhmel 7 points 1 month ago

And COBOL is listed as third-generation on Wikipedia, too.

I now remember reading about this concept of generations in a book about Ada, it seemed fascinating then but turned out to not be as good as expected 🥲

Also, Unix Shell is listed as 4GL example. There are SPSS, MATLAB, R, and Wolphram Alpha in the same list of examples, that kind of shows where 4GL went today.

load more comments (4 replies)