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So obviously there’s been a lot of legacy COBOL kicking around, but is this still the case? Would a new COBOL project have been started in the last 20 years? I
by robin_reala 2y ago
So obviously there’s been a lot of legacy COBOL kicking around, but is this still the case? Would a new COBOL project have been started in the last 20 years? I kind of imagined that Java (or at least the JVM) has eaten its lunch.
- slowmotiony 2y agoI worked for two very big banks in europe and we have lots of cobol batch jobs that were written like 30 or 40 years ago.
- jmclnx 2y agoHow many objects without source did you find there ? In the 80s (and probably before), every system I worked on had at least one critical COBOL program missing source code. I am wondering if you noticed the same with this project.
- b800h 2y agoMissing source code? That's terrifying.
- alex_suzuki 2y agoPar for the course.
- derriz 2y agoI did some contracting for a retail bank a good while back and the COBOL source for the term deposit interest calculation routine had been lost a few decades earlier but was still in use. I suggested a rewrite but there was no enthusiasm/support for it - especially as my prototype could not exactly reproduce the rounding. Nobody wanted to have to deal with customer communications to explain why one cent of interest was being paid a month earlier or later than before.
- jmclnx 2y ago> suggested a rewrite but there was no enthusiasm/support for it Been there :) Yes, you always get a "no" for doing that.
- SonOfLilit 2y agoAhaha I'm also working with a bank and "customer communications" is a really nice euphemism for "barrage of class action suits". I'm sitting here in the office laughing out loud.
- slowmotiony 2y agoTotally normal, happened all the time :))
- armorer 2y agoYes, there's a lot of it kicking around. This evolved from a personal testbed to iterate on ideas to apply on actual legacy code modernisation work I've been involved in.
- Muromec 2y agoSo, is the color of your bank's logo blue, green, red or orange?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nazgulsenpai 2y agoMy (non-bank) employer still has lots of COBOL in production, and its constantly extended. Before working here I expected all COBOL to be running on some large IBM mainframe, but no. It's x86-64 Windows -- COBOL compiled to native Windows binaries. Edited to specify not a bank.
- Suppafly 2y agoIs there some advantage to using COBOL or did they just have an old COBOL programmer who just kept using it?
- bigbuppo 2y agoEvery single attempt to replace COBOL has ended in failure. COBOL will never die. You can move it to new platforms, but it can never be replaced.
- Suppafly 2y agoThat's not really true, lots of places of replace it with newer stuff.
- nazgulsenpai 2y agoI'm not privy to the details as a sysadmin but based on observation its either an application requirement or legacy foundational codebase carried forward -- probably a combination of both.
- CalumSult 2y agoAs someone doing support and occasional code changes for a pile of vb6 that doesn't sound that bad. If you need a code base to be stable for decades COBOL beats vb6.
- karlmdavis 2y agoA number of US federal agencies still have astonishing amounts of it. The world’s largest insurer, Medicare, uses 10M+ lines of COBOL to process the claims it receives — total dollar amounts that make up 3% of the yearly GDP. Maintaining and modernizing these critical systems is important work.
- uselpa 2y agoOur shop (a bank) still develops in COBOL on a daily basis (IBM mainframe) and has a stock of tenth of millions of code lines.
- ianmcgowan 2y agoConverting to Lithp any day now...
- chasil 2y agoAbsolutely, we have several full time people who specialize in COBOL variants for VMS and OS2200.
- Muromec 2y agoPlaces that have cobol are the same places that have a bunch or laws being your list of requirement and nobody stopped writing laws in those 20 years. Those are also the places where risk is supposed to be in a different department.
- SonOfLilit 2y agoThere are probably tens of thousands of active COBOL developers maintaining systems written no later than I guess the nineties.
- rodgerd 2y agoYes? Any "lets move this COBOL to something else" will, more often than not, flounder on the fact that "rewrite all this functionality" will cost massively more than "just find someone to extend what we already have".
- jamesfinlayson 2y agoCase in point: https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-bourse-operator-partners-with-tcs-trading-software-replacement-2023-11-19/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/australian-bourse-operato...
- jamesfinlayson 2y agoI doubt many new projects get started in it, but there's still plenty out there even outside of banking, insurance etc - a guy I used to work with was a PHP developer and at a previous job he'd had to modify COBOL for a company that sold carpet.