Communications of the ACM
The Latin of Software Code Is Thriving
It's often seen as a problem or a punchline that so much musty technology is still around, but it's not necessarily an issue.
Credit: James Kerr/Scorpion Dagger
Computer mainframes and the COBOL code that powers them will not win any cool points in Silicon Valley, but it is essential technology at big banks, insurance companies, government agencies, and other large institutions.
The designers of COBOL never expected it to last this long; the software's pioneers expected it to be a useful stopgap until something better came along. But the resilience in decades-old computing technologies like COBOL, and the people who specialize in them, shows that new technologies are often built on lots of old tech.
From The New York Times
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