alt Hacker NewsThis is a weird take. Sure, plenty of cool/nice things from old languages (e.g. variable-sized stack frames in Ada) get lost, and some then get rediscovered by future languages, potentially wasting effort. And I don't know COBOL, so maybe you're actually making a good point.
But I find that hard to believe. Does COBOL really solve all the same problems Rust is intended to solve? Is it as performant? Can it interface with native code from other languages in the same way? Does it have a usable and sane package manager built on top of a module system that facilitates composability and backward compatibility? Does it have a way to describe the shape of data and errors as ergonomically as Rust's algebraic data types?
Genuinely curious: as I said, I don't know COBOL. I'd find it extremely surprising if the answers to all these questions are "yes," though. Just as there are reasons COBOL is still used, there are also (good) reasons new languages have been created.
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Imagine having a shell script being called from a cron job that writes data in a bunch of tab separated memory mapped files (memory mapping happens when you configure the thing), but you have more files than memory. And all the shell scripts call and include each other and have global variables too.
And that underpins most of the critical infrastructure in your country.
A lot to unpack in this question.
Do they solve all the same problems? No, for example COBOL lacks a modern concept of concurrency within a single program. COBOL's concurrency features are based on task-level parallelism, which involves dividing a program into multiple tasks that can be executed concurrently.
Is it performant? Yes. COBOL is highly efficient particularly in handling large datasets and complex business logic and its compilers are optimized for reliability and speed.
Can it interface with native code? Yes.
Does it have a package manager? No.
Does it describe shape of data? No. Data structures in COBOL are defined using fixed-length records.
Note: I'm not a COBOL expert. I did learn it in college, though.