Re: Too late....
"with the more "modern" (don't make me laught) programming languages, and the lost appreciation for cpu power and memory being limited ressources. Guess what, when you need to do a lot of these calculations concurrently these things do matter."
Absolutely, but I have to wonder about a few things:
1. The computers you're using to run the old assembly and COBOL probably cost more than cheaper modern computers. Have you calculated the various resource costs of using those modern computers? I can run an inefficient program on a modern computer and have it complete faster and cheaper than running an optimized program on an old computer. I can also produce an optimized program that will be even better on the modern computer.
2. So your calculations are going slowly with some modern language you don't like. Have you tried multiple languages? There aren't a lot of COBOL systems running on modern hardware but there are a ton of C ones and C is also pretty fast. If C doesn't work, there are other low-level languages available which have execution speed as an important factor. If you're comparing assembly to Python, it's not a fair comparison.
3. So you can't write it to run on modern computers, even in C. The assembly that was written decades ago was probably quite well-tuned. Have you considered writing well-tuned assembly again today if you need performance so badly? The people who write compilers know how to do it. Maybe it's not modern developers causing the problem, but comparing two very different approaches: one where people worked hard to speed it up and one where a straw replacement was created quickly and judged even faster.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
