Scala Less Popular Than COBOL: Programming In The Real World(nerds-central.blogspot.com) |
Scala Less Popular Than COBOL: Programming In The Real World(nerds-central.blogspot.com) |
BTW, for fun, see this recent job for a Haskell expert in India - 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. :}
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 :-)
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.
In banking, and there are plenty of examples of brand new systems being rolled out in Cobol.
The human brain really is a wonderful thing.
[1] Yes, hackers, not entrepreneurs.
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!
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.
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/
In which a survey of dubious relevance is used as evidence for an argument about the relevance of a programming language.
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.
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, ...