alt Hacker News"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare
COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.
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> "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare
Kemeny and Kurtz described Fortran as "old-fashioned" in 1968! <https://dtss.dartmouth.edu/sciencearticle/index.html>
More accurate might be "I don't know what the language of 2000 will be called, but I know it will look like Fortran."
This was almost true in 2000. It is not true now. Things change. Slowly.
But are these legacy systems from the 70s, 80s, 90s using modern cobol?
Nobody writes
any more.