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When you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Heal

When you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Healthcare, COBOL. Social Security, COBOL. Point of Sale, COBOL. IRS, COBOL. Pension funds? COBOL. Hotel bookings? COBOL. Payroll programs? COBOL. It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more than 100 lines. This was why Y2K genuinely scared everyone and was a very real problem. The only reason we can look back at it and laugh now is that an army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.

arcticbull 2y ago
Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us. [edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters on names, passenger names are two fixed-length fields (first name, last name) and title and middle name just gets appended together. So you get LASTNAME/FIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAMENTITLE on your bookings. And each of those fields is truncated lol. and of course flight numbers are fixed at 4 digits, so we're running out of those. Not exactly a great ad.
- palisade 2y ago
  Oof, I've got good news and bad news for you.... they still are creating new code in it. Yeah, there are fewer engineers in COBOL which is why it pays BIG bucks now. They desperately need someone to maintain that massive infrastructure that has been built up over 75 years that cannot be replaced easily or quickly.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- toast0 2y ago
  "Legacy code" is also known as "the important code that makes the business work" If these new fangled languages are so great, one day they can be legacy code too. :P
  - Muromec 2y ago
    That's not what makes something legacy. Legacy is something highly not advisable to change because it's both makes the business work and can't be easily changed because of complexity, loss of context, high blast radius or whatever. It's just there and you have to deal with it. If it wasn't complex, opaque and scary to touch it would not have been just another piece of something to be replaced and updated like the copyright date in the footer.
Muromec 2y ago
I'm a big enjoyer of arcain arts, but I happen to work in a place that actually has it and no -- nobody likes COBOL and it's not cool in any sense.
- palisade 2y ago
  Well, there is a good reason no one likes it. It isn't cool, I completely agree. Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though? Ya.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    >Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though? It's performant, you can't take away that.
wglb 2y ago
The Y2K effort was much more nuanced than this. I was there for it and it was more like highly targeted patching based on carefully crafted test sets and frameworks. > army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time. No way did all get rewritten. Where source was available, fixes were applied and systems retested. True drama ensued for programs for which the source was no longer obtainable. The company I was at during that time had programs that had been in production since at least 1960. The other effort that took place was attending to the systems during the midnight boundary with everybody either in the office or on call. The other strong observation was that the risks were very much not understood, with exaggerations both extreme and dismissive. Also not discussed in the popular press at the time was the extent that most of these systems were not truly totally automated.

arcticbull 2y ago

Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us. [edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters on names, passenger names are two fixed-length fields (first name, last name) and title and middle name just gets appended together. So you get LASTNAME/FIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAMENTITLE on your bookings. And each of those fields is truncated lol. and of course flight numbers are fixed at 4 digits, so we're running out of those. Not exactly a great ad.

palisade 2y ago
Oof, I've got good news and bad news for you.... they still are creating new code in it. Yeah, there are fewer engineers in COBOL which is why it pays BIG bucks now. They desperately need someone to maintain that massive infrastructure that has been built up over 75 years that cannot be replaced easily or quickly.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
toast0 2y ago
"Legacy code" is also known as "the important code that makes the business work" If these new fangled languages are so great, one day they can be legacy code too. :P
- Muromec 2y ago
  That's not what makes something legacy. Legacy is something highly not advisable to change because it's both makes the business work and can't be easily changed because of complexity, loss of context, high blast radius or whatever. It's just there and you have to deal with it. If it wasn't complex, opaque and scary to touch it would not have been just another piece of something to be replaced and updated like the copyright date in the footer.

Muromec 2y ago

I'm a big enjoyer of arcain arts, but I happen to work in a place that actually has it and no -- nobody likes COBOL and it's not cool in any sense.

palisade 2y ago
Well, there is a good reason no one likes it. It isn't cool, I completely agree. Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though? Ya.
- Muromec 2y ago
  >Readable, simple, safe, performant and still relevant though? It's performant, you can't take away that.

wglb 2y ago

The Y2K effort was much more nuanced than this. I was there for it and it was more like highly targeted patching based on carefully crafted test sets and frameworks. > army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time. No way did all get rewritten. Where source was available, fixes were applied and systems retested. True drama ensued for programs for which the source was no longer obtainable. The company I was at during that time had programs that had been in production since at least 1960. The other effort that took place was attending to the systems during the midnight boundary with everybody either in the office or on call. The other strong observation was that the risks were very much not understood, with exaggerations both extreme and dismissive. Also not discussed in the popular press at the time was the extent that most of these systems were not truly totally automated.