The Infrastructure Effect: COBOL and Go

Languages used for IT infrastructure don’t have expiration dates.
COBOL’s been around for 60 years—and isn’t going anywhere anytime
soon. We maintain billions of lines of classic code for
mainframes. But we’re also building new infrastructures for the
cloud in languages like Go.


COBOL was a giant leap for computers to make industries more
efficient. Chris Short describes how learning COBOL was seen as a
safe long-term bet. Sixty years later, there are billions of
lines of COBOL code that can’t easily be replaced—and few
specialists who know the language. Ritika Trikha explains that
something must change: Either more people must learn COBOL, or
the industries that rely on it have to update their codebase.
Both choices are difficult. But the future isn’t being written in
COBOL. Today’s IT infrastructure is built in the cloud—and a lot
of it is written in Go. Carmen Hernández Andoh shares how Go’s
designers wanted a language more suited for the cloud. And Kelsey
Hightower points out that languages are typically hyper-focused
for one task. But they’re increasingly open and flexible.


You can learn more about COBOL or Go, or any of the languages
we’re covering this season, by heading over to
redhat.com/CommandLineHeroes.


We're passing along a correction that Carmen Hernández Andoh
shared on Twitter: she misspoke about Rob Pike inventing ASCII.
Bob Bremer is considered the main creator of ASCII.


Follow along with the episode transcript