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Discussion on: 5 old Programming Languages you should know about

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huncyrus profile image
huncyrus

I have the same though as for half of the existing populars (go, java, rust...). I don't see the usecase to choose any of em' instead of c++.

[tl;dr]
Funfact, in the Nordic region (Sweden, Norway) used Cobol and Fortran for their tax and retirement fund handling. The people who designed the system, they still work for the government (age over 75); nobody dare to touch the system because:

  • 1.) it is working
  • 2.) nobody know why it is working

But in fact they do burn literal millions to just maintain (every year they try to train hunders of youngsters; adding java based services; reginal servers; data centrals and so on).
The codebase so large, so slow, so slow to compile it is unbelivable (we talking about days). On a more modern approach they probably would be able to drop their expenses by 90% (do not need hunderds of devs, do not need half building amount of servers...), but this will not change any time soon... except, if the old folks finally retire :D

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blag profile image
Alvaro (Blag) Tejada Galindo

It’s not about use cases…it’s about being aware of them…knowing a little bit of how they work…I don’t use any of them for work…but I still enjoy learning them and using them once in a while…without them…we wouldn’t have any of the new and shiny ones 😉