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Languages used for IT infrastructure don鈥檛 have expiration dates. COBOL鈥檚 been around for 60 years鈥攁nd isn鈥檛 going anywhere anytime soon. We maintain billions of lines of classic code for mainframes. But we鈥檙e 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鈥檛 easily be replaced鈥攁nd 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鈥檛 being written in COBOL. Today鈥檚 IT infrastructure is built in the cloud鈥攁nd a lot of it is written in Go. Carmen Hern谩ndez Andoh shares how Go鈥檚 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鈥檙e increasingly open and flexible.