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Scala Less Popular Than COBOL: Programming In The Real World

PaulHoule 14y ago
I did a short stint of Scala programming and I didn't like it. The last straw was when I spent a few days debugging something involving actors that the author of the code didn't understand. It took 15 minutes to reimplement this flawlessly with Java's ExecutorService and that handled all the tough problems like error handling. I learned a lot from Scala that I carried into my Java programming, but I wouldn't start a project in Scala.
- code-dog 14y ago
  I like scala but the compiler is slooooooooow. The tooling needs work before it can be main stream.
dhconnelly 14y ago
Another indication of how far removed we HN readers are from the real world, where people get shit done instead of argue about semicolons.
- code-dog 14y ago
  Could not have put it better myself.
- danieldk 14y ago
  Except that services like Twitter are used massively in the real world and do use Scala. They are both languages in the tails, although different tails: Scala currently only has early adopters, Cobol is mostly used in systems that are in maintenance model. Scala has the potential to get a bigger slice of the pie, while Cobol's glory days are past.
  - fiskah 14y ago
    Whether Cobol's glory days are past or not, is really depending on the industry. In banking, and there are plenty of examples of brand new systems being rolled out in Cobol.
    - soc88 14y ago
      ... and also in Scala, although I agree that COBOL will remain in use until the end of mankind. :-)
  - dhconnelly 14y ago
    Sure. I didn't mean to imply that Scala is not used in the real world.
- mhurron 14y ago
  Did you know it was possible to get work done AND have opinions about things? The human brain really is a wonderful thing.
- exim 14y ago
  Well, for true hackers[1], it is not about getting shit done. It is about how shit is done or, to be precise, how proof-of-concept shit is done. And getting enjoyment out of the process itself. [1] Yes, hackers, not entrepreneurs.
mrspeaker 14y ago
And "Two and a Half Men" is more popular than... well I don't know TV, but you get my half-assed point.
wglb 14y ago
Ogod--RPG?? From a previous life, that was the only language that made me want to go to COBOL. Ok, not to put too fine a point on it, "talked about" doesn't mean "popular". For a better perspective, check out the pay you can get for working COBOL vs, say, Rails. That is a bit more enlightening.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Roboprog 14y ago
Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date. Looking at the line graphs allows us to intuit the "first order" derivative of the popularity graph. COBOL has a negative derivative, Scala has a positive derivative. There might be more people employed maintaining COBOL, but which field is shedding jobs, and which is hiring, if only a little? I'm a little bit biased, because I have actually used Scala a tiny bit at work. I found a niche that it is actually quite good at: one-off scripting on top of existing Java application code. Scala may compile slow, but when you are running a 200 line script to do some research, having concise code with a few functions passing around a few lists and tuples, which allows you to "just twiddle a bit, hit 'up arrow' and rerun" is a win. I've never developed an application in Scala, and I probably never will, but I love it for scripting. Oh, and I have worked on RPG a bit, too, but that was in the early 90s. Actually, not so much programmed in RPG as worked on a product to translate RPG into C on various OSs. Whether or not the clients continued programming in RPG using a cross compiler, or took their C code and ran, I can't say. YMMV :-)
soc88 14y ago
> That must be a accident of the way TIOBE is put together yes? No! I had at least expected that the author did his 5 minutes of research to discover that there are indeed issues affecting rankings of languages like Scala, Haskell, ...
devel45a 14y ago
First of all Cobol is actually quite widely used for legacy systems. As as been covered frequently Tiobe is a poor indicator of language popularity especially for Scala. e.g. capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/language-popularity-its-not-about-search-engine-result-counts/
- code-dog 14y ago
  I guess that is not the real point of the post. It seems to be more about keeping grounded and not taking 'the buzz' too seriously.
dons 14y ago
Friends don't let friends cite TIOBE. BTW, for fun, see this recent job for a Haskell expert in India - http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-expert-jobs/ http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-exper... -- turns out (I asked) they're developing tools to translate COBOL into more modern languages, since you can't hire COBOL programmers anymore. Of course, the translation tool is in Haskell. :}
- JulianMorrison 14y ago
  Or perhaps, they want to write a COBOL monad...
  - cassandravoiton 14y ago
    Sounds like a challenge. Should be do-able in managed COBOL using delegates.
- ahnunahki 14y ago
  And if you ever worked in modernizing legacy (COBOL,RPG..) applications you'd know that those translating tools are absolute shit. In the end all that code ends up being rewritten in a language that is more corporate friendly and not some sanskrit equivalent.
ahnunahki 14y ago
Who really wants to use Scala besides those bay area folks in startup la la land? Those of us who work in the real world know better.
dkhenry 14y ago
So if the point of this article is to say that we shouldn't buy into hype then I agree. However to try to claim that the Tiobe represents anything close to an accurate portrayal of programming language popularity is nonsensical. also this idea that web hype and the "Real World" don't match up is flawed. Most things get web hype because they are doing things in this real world.
- guelo 14y ago
  TIOBE might not be accurate but I think we can say it is "close to accurate" based on the fact that it agrees with known trends such as the recent iOS related rise of Objective C, or the long slow decline of Perl.
- bigbob 14y ago
  Agreed. TIOBE is only a part of gauging a language's popularity. TIOBE looks at the results of search engines regardless of the recency of the search results. So older languages will obviously have more sticking power. I like to look at current job offerings, google trends, and book trends along with TIOBE when gauging a language's popularity.
samstokes 14y ago
TL;DR: "Scala is dead; Netcraft confirms it." In which a survey of dubious relevance is used as evidence for an argument about the relevance of a programming language.
CookWithMe 14y ago
From wikipedia: "Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or common, or having a high social status." I doubt that Scala is less liked than COBOL, however, due to the age of COBOL, it is very likely that COBOL is more common. Don't really see the point of the article. Either it states obvious news or it kinda claims that of all programmers out there, most will choose COBOL over Scala (which I doubt heavily and there is no data to back that up - but that is probably the more interesting question on popularity). Anyway, I did a bit more than a Hello World with COBOL in university. I know companies are searching like mad for COBOL programmers and you could earn a shitload of money... But I won't do that stuff for the rest of my life!
coldarchon 14y ago
70% of all processes computed right in this secound were written in COBOL. I don't think this guy has ANY idea how to interpret the data he got. And yes, I'm a freelancer fixing COBOL code ..

I did a short stint of Scala programming and I didn't like it. The last straw was when I spent a few days debugging something involving actors that the author of the code didn't understand. It took 15 minutes to reimplement this flawlessly with Java's ExecutorService and that handled all the tough problems like error handling. I learned a lot from Scala that I carried into my Java programming, but I wouldn't start a project in Scala.

code-dog 14y ago
I like scala but the compiler is slooooooooow. The tooling needs work before it can be main stream.

dhconnelly 14y ago

Another indication of how far removed we HN readers are from the real world, where people get shit done instead of argue about semicolons.

code-dog 14y ago
Could not have put it better myself.
danieldk 14y ago
Except that services like Twitter are used massively in the real world and do use Scala. They are both languages in the tails, although different tails: Scala currently only has early adopters, Cobol is mostly used in systems that are in maintenance model. Scala has the potential to get a bigger slice of the pie, while Cobol's glory days are past.
- fiskah 14y ago
  Whether Cobol's glory days are past or not, is really depending on the industry. In banking, and there are plenty of examples of brand new systems being rolled out in Cobol.
  - soc88 14y ago
    ... and also in Scala, although I agree that COBOL will remain in use until the end of mankind. :-)
- dhconnelly 14y ago
  Sure. I didn't mean to imply that Scala is not used in the real world.
mhurron 14y ago
Did you know it was possible to get work done AND have opinions about things? The human brain really is a wonderful thing.
exim 14y ago
Well, for true hackers[1], it is not about getting shit done. It is about how shit is done or, to be precise, how proof-of-concept shit is done. And getting enjoyment out of the process itself. [1] Yes, hackers, not entrepreneurs.

mrspeaker 14y ago

And "Two and a Half Men" is more popular than... well I don't know TV, but you get my half-assed point.

wglb 14y ago

Ogod--RPG?? From a previous life, that was the only language that made me want to go to COBOL. Ok, not to put too fine a point on it, "talked about" doesn't mean "popular". For a better perspective, check out the pay you can get for working COBOL vs, say, Rails. That is a bit more enlightening.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Roboprog 14y ago

Well, at least he used some line graphs at the end of the article, showing ratings over time, and not just a pie chart with status at some date. Looking at the line graphs allows us to intuit the "first order" derivative of the popularity graph. COBOL has a negative derivative, Scala has a positive derivative. There might be more people employed maintaining COBOL, but which field is shedding jobs, and which is hiring, if only a little? I'm a little bit biased, because I have actually used Scala a tiny bit at work. I found a niche that it is actually quite good at: one-off scripting on top of existing Java application code. Scala may compile slow, but when you are running a 200 line script to do some research, having concise code with a few functions passing around a few lists and tuples, which allows you to "just twiddle a bit, hit 'up arrow' and rerun" is a win. I've never developed an application in Scala, and I probably never will, but I love it for scripting. Oh, and I have worked on RPG a bit, too, but that was in the early 90s. Actually, not so much programmed in RPG as worked on a product to translate RPG into C on various OSs. Whether or not the clients continued programming in RPG using a cross compiler, or took their C code and ran, I can't say. YMMV :-)

soc88 14y ago

> That must be a accident of the way TIOBE is put together yes? No! I had at least expected that the author did his 5 minutes of research to discover that there are indeed issues affecting rankings of languages like Scala, Haskell, ...

devel45a 14y ago

First of all Cobol is actually quite widely used for legacy systems. As as been covered frequently Tiobe is a poor indicator of language popularity especially for Scala. e.g. capecoder.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/language-popularity-its-not-about-search-engine-result-counts/

code-dog 14y ago
I guess that is not the real point of the post. It seems to be more about keeping grounded and not taking 'the buzz' too seriously.

dons 14y ago

Friends don't let friends cite TIOBE. BTW, for fun, see this recent job for a Haskell expert in India - http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-expert-jobs/ http://www.simplyhired.co.in/job-id/jh4gosrgqr/haskell-exper... -- turns out (I asked) they're developing tools to translate COBOL into more modern languages, since you can't hire COBOL programmers anymore. Of course, the translation tool is in Haskell. :}

JulianMorrison 14y ago
Or perhaps, they want to write a COBOL monad...
- cassandravoiton 14y ago
  Sounds like a challenge. Should be do-able in managed COBOL using delegates.
ahnunahki 14y ago
And if you ever worked in modernizing legacy (COBOL,RPG..) applications you'd know that those translating tools are absolute shit. In the end all that code ends up being rewritten in a language that is more corporate friendly and not some sanskrit equivalent.

ahnunahki 14y ago

Who really wants to use Scala besides those bay area folks in startup la la land? Those of us who work in the real world know better.

dkhenry 14y ago

So if the point of this article is to say that we shouldn't buy into hype then I agree. However to try to claim that the Tiobe represents anything close to an accurate portrayal of programming language popularity is nonsensical. also this idea that web hype and the "Real World" don't match up is flawed. Most things get web hype because they are doing things in this real world.

guelo 14y ago
TIOBE might not be accurate but I think we can say it is "close to accurate" based on the fact that it agrees with known trends such as the recent iOS related rise of Objective C, or the long slow decline of Perl.
bigbob 14y ago
Agreed. TIOBE is only a part of gauging a language's popularity. TIOBE looks at the results of search engines regardless of the recency of the search results. So older languages will obviously have more sticking power. I like to look at current job offerings, google trends, and book trends along with TIOBE when gauging a language's popularity.

samstokes 14y ago

TL;DR: "Scala is dead; Netcraft confirms it." In which a survey of dubious relevance is used as evidence for an argument about the relevance of a programming language.

CookWithMe 14y ago

From wikipedia: "Popularity is the quality of being well-liked or common, or having a high social status." I doubt that Scala is less liked than COBOL, however, due to the age of COBOL, it is very likely that COBOL is more common. Don't really see the point of the article. Either it states obvious news or it kinda claims that of all programmers out there, most will choose COBOL over Scala (which I doubt heavily and there is no data to back that up - but that is probably the more interesting question on popularity). Anyway, I did a bit more than a Hello World with COBOL in university. I know companies are searching like mad for COBOL programmers and you could earn a shitload of money... But I won't do that stuff for the rest of my life!

coldarchon 14y ago

70% of all processes computed right in this secound were written in COBOL. I don't think this guy has ANY idea how to interpret the data he got. And yes, I'm a freelancer fixing COBOL code ..