Anyone worked with old languages? Cobol? Fortran?

[Harrison]

I've not touched COBOL since leaving school. The reason IBM mainframes still use it is because IBM helped invent the language at the end of the 50's and it has been used by IBM mainframes since the 60's. As with most things, if it isn't broken why fix it. And sticking to the same language for so long means that code doesn't need to be changed much over the lifetime of a system and training of employees isn't as expensive over time.

Although it is mad to consider that such an old language is still the main language being used on the majority of the worlds main computer systems. I just looked this up to check and it is estimated that over 80% of the world's business is run on COBOL! Mad considering how inefficient the language's syntax can be when using less concise structure and how difficult it is to work with something as simple as a local variable, when compared to other newer languages.

As for old languages I use, I'm not sure I have done recently. I tend to only code in PHP, MySQL, VBA, some Javascript, patTemplate, Lingo and some Actionscript. And if they count, also SSH terminal (Linux/Unix) scripting. The oldest language there is Lingo which is the native language for Macromedia (Adobe) Director which dates back quite a few years.

[Tiago]

The 80% is related to Baking only.

[Harrison]

The 80% is related to Baking only.

Baking? Nice typo. 80% or Chefs choose z/OS.

According to the articles I found, COBOL is still used worldwide by most Banks, Finance and Administrative companies, Insurance companies and Governments. And I also found a statistic that stating that as of 2002 there were over two million COBOL programmers world-wide, compared to only one million C++ programmers!

And I am sure this is because of two very different marketplaces. The business mainframe market is vertical with only a couple of copies of most code ever being used at once, but accessed many times via terminal access, whereas the commercial marketplace is horizontal with a lot of copies being used at any one time over a shorter lifespan, and so is instead coded in C++.

[Harrison]

Do you both now use OO-COBOL? Or just the older original COBOL?

[Tiago]

Do you both now use OO-COBOL? Or just the older original COBOL?

The old one
I think most companies still use Cobol II version (quite old) ...