3 ms·
Most of those cobol programs are doing something equivalent to a single SQL query. And Cobol programs are _verbose_. Have a look at the examples on Rosetta cod
by solresol 5y ago
Most of those cobol programs are doing something equivalent to a single SQL query.
And Cobol programs are _verbose_. Have a look at the examples on Rosetta code. C# (which isn't particularly concise) can do in 40 lines what Cobol needs 250+
Where we (modern programmers) would write a program with a large number of modules and imports, most Cobol programmers probably wouldn't. There is a lot of copying-and-pasting going on there.
That's an average program length of 3000 lines. Imagine your code base consisted of 112,500 files, each of about 500 lines (including HTML, CSS, SQL statements and "real" program code).
That's about what it is equivalent to.
Plugging that equivalent number into a Cocomo calculator, it says "20 years of 800+ programmers".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 5y agoThanks, this is good context! > Plugging that equivalent number into a Cocomo calculator, it says "20 years of 800+ programmers". Of course, it's been 50+ years, but I doubt Bank of New York had 300+ programmers working for them all those years? It would make sense if copy-paste were a lot of it. Which makes me think if you did want (or more likely have no choice and need) to make some serious changes to the codebase, some kind of automated assist could be very helpful. I wonder what the state of COBOL tooling is. I wonder if it's going to get better as the technical debt comes due in a hard way.
- heisenbit 5y agoThe challenge is not the individual program but how it all fits together to make the business work. It may be easy to find people to turn out Cobol code but it will take a long while to fully understand a beast with million lines. Fun bit: Some of these lines only run once a year during holidays so one better makes no mistakes here.