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Yes to your point, COBOL which ranks very low here is still fundamental to the infrastructure of several major industries, with some sources [1] reporting that

Yes to your point, COBOL which ranks very low here is still fundamental to the infrastructure of several major industries, with some sources [1] reporting that it is used in: 43% of all banking systems. 95% of all US ATM transactions. 80% of all in-person credit card transactions. 96% of travel bookings. This may very well dramatically change in the next few years with such an emphasis on enterprise AI tools to rewrite large COBOL repositories. [2] [1] https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson#table-of-contents https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-wit... [2] e.g. Blitzy https://paper.blitzy.com/blitzy_system_2_ai_platform_topping_swe_bench_verified.pdf https://paper.blitzy.com/blitzy_system_2_ai_platform_topping...

zabzonk 1y ago
In retail banking I'm sure that this could be true. Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application, or had to have my C++/Java/$MODERNLANGUAGE code interact with one.
- davedx 1y ago
  Yeah when I worked in investment banking it was VBA and Java everywhere, never saw or heard of COBOL.
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  Corp bank here, everyone has rumours about COBOL systems but no one I've ever spoke to has seen, interacted or has any other evidence these really exist anymore either.
  - charlieyu1 1y ago
    Me neither. But I asked for a bank statement from my old savings account a few years old and it took two weeks to print out, printed in monospace dot matrix. Or the betting company that I was a customer that suspends betting everyday 6:30am for an hour for daily maintainance. Ironically, they would accept bets for football matches played at the time, but the system was shut down. I suspect both are run on COBOL.
  - qwertyuiop_ 1y ago
    You haven’t seen or heard them because they are abstracted away by APIs, circuit breakers and proxies. Almost ALL banks, credit card companies, travel systems and other high throughput transaction systems run on mainframe that is written in COBOL.
    - zabzonk 1y ago
      I think the issue here is that people working in fintech don't seem to come across these systems much, if at all - if you know one specifically, please tell us.
      - lief79 1y ago
        It's still there at the accounting/backend level. Automated Financial Systems Level 3 and it's replacement Vision are commercial loan systems. LVL3 is pure cobol. It has been recently deprecated but there are many banks who own the code and are still self hosting it, along with it's IBM green screen support. Vision is a java front end in front of an updated cobol backend. When your reputation is based on your reliability and long term code stability, at what point do you risk making the conversion, versus training new developers to work on your system. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/business-analyst-afs-vision-finance-banking-at-jobs-via-dice-4295389587/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/business-analyst-afs-visi...
        lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        Analogously, GDSes like SABRE still ran on mainframes until very recently (c. 2023) [0]. SABRE was written in some combination of assembly and some kind of in-house dialect of PL/I, if I recall. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/gds_gets_over_historic_formatting/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/gds_gets_over_histori...
        cyberpunk 1y ago
        No, we are not afraid of our own systems. The idea that there is some fabled computer system which everyone is too scared to touch doesn’t exist (I work in payment processing). There are levels of controls way outside these systems which provide these safety nets (e.g settlement / reconciliation controls). If the cobol is still there, it’s not due to risk. If anything, the cobol is a much higher operational risk than replacing it.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application What was the back office settlement or wire transfer system written in? There is a good chance that some part of them was written in COBOL. And while Bloomberg terminals are a vendor product, for a bloody long time, many of their screens had some COBOL. Also, lots of quantitative software at i-banks use LINPACK or BLAS, which use FORTRAN.
  - zabzonk 1y ago
    Well, I had a very badly specified project to write a library for our back office systems to do Swift payments from our C++ applications, via COM. There was no obvious COBOL involved, on either side, but it has to be said that the whole use case for the library was very murky. And it never worked, due to the lack of spec, not the languages.
- umpalumpaaa 1y ago
  First hand knowledge: ERGO and MunichRE both have a lot of cobol still doing the core business. You will most likely never run into the system because they just run batch jobs - sometimes configured via a “nice” web UI… you configure your job, submit and the next morning you have your report… that’s why you never actually see COBOL.
ffsm8 1y ago
Cobol is used in pretty much all enterprise legacy systems. But "used in" doesn't mean that it's actively being developed by more then a tiny team for maintaining it. As this graph we're commenting on is mostly talking about popularity/most used it's never going to rate higher, because for every one Cobol dev there are more then 100 Java devs employed by the same company
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  That's a pretty wild claim. What's legacy for you? I'd consider legacy e.g J2EE crap running on web[sphere|logic] as holding most of the points in that league table vs COBOL.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    A legacy software to me is whatever the company that employs me says is said legacy software. Pretty much every business I've worked at to date has had such legacy software, which was inevitably still used in some contexts. It's not always obvious, because - following with the previous example numbers - only 1-2 Java devs will have to interact with the legacy software again, hence from the perspective of the remaining 98, Cobol doesn't exist anymore.
  - lief79 1y ago
    If they're talking about Cobol, it's usually systems originating before the early 90s that haven't been completely rewritten. J2EE would be late 90s and 2000s.
BoredPositron 1y ago
I can only speak to the two bigger German banks (i.e., Sparkasse and VR banks), but if you look at their outsourced development providers (Atruvia and Sparkasse Informatik), they're still offering incentives for their apprentices to learn COBOL, especially in the german dual apprenticeship programs which they can steer more easily than university courses. My wife has been doing COBOL for one of them since 2012, and the demand has never diminished. If anything, it's increased because experienced developers are retiring. They even pull some of these retired developers back for particularly challenging projects.
- cyberpunk 1y ago
  Sparkasse and VR aren't the two largest German banks. DB is at least double the size of Commerzbank which is again 100mn in assets ahead of DZ. I don't find it all that surprising that these small banks are still trying to keep their legacy systems alive, but it's not the case for the bigger boys. (Source: work for several of them)
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    You are right if we only talk about assets. Should've clarified I meant more in regards of retail customers and branches.
    - cyberpunk 1y ago
      Oh, right, consumer banks. Yes I can imagine they're all extremely legacy bound. They're a very small percentage of banking, though.

zabzonk 1y ago

In retail banking I'm sure that this could be true. Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application, or had to have my C++/Java/$MODERNLANGUAGE code interact with one.

davedx 1y ago
Yeah when I worked in investment banking it was VBA and Java everywhere, never saw or heard of COBOL.
cyberpunk 1y ago
Corp bank here, everyone has rumours about COBOL systems but no one I've ever spoke to has seen, interacted or has any other evidence these really exist anymore either.
- charlieyu1 1y ago
  Me neither. But I asked for a bank statement from my old savings account a few years old and it took two weeks to print out, printed in monospace dot matrix. Or the betting company that I was a customer that suspends betting everyday 6:30am for an hour for daily maintainance. Ironically, they would accept bets for football matches played at the time, but the system was shut down. I suspect both are run on COBOL.
- qwertyuiop_ 1y ago
  You haven’t seen or heard them because they are abstracted away by APIs, circuit breakers and proxies. Almost ALL banks, credit card companies, travel systems and other high throughput transaction systems run on mainframe that is written in COBOL.
  - zabzonk 1y ago
    I think the issue here is that people working in fintech don't seem to come across these systems much, if at all - if you know one specifically, please tell us.
    - lief79 1y ago
      It's still there at the accounting/backend level. Automated Financial Systems Level 3 and it's replacement Vision are commercial loan systems. LVL3 is pure cobol. It has been recently deprecated but there are many banks who own the code and are still self hosting it, along with it's IBM green screen support. Vision is a java front end in front of an updated cobol backend. When your reputation is based on your reliability and long term code stability, at what point do you risk making the conversion, versus training new developers to work on your system. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/business-analyst-afs-vision-finance-banking-at-jobs-via-dice-4295389587/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/business-analyst-afs-visi...
      - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        Analogously, GDSes like SABRE still ran on mainframes until very recently (c. 2023) [0]. SABRE was written in some combination of assembly and some kind of in-house dialect of PL/I, if I recall. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/gds_gets_over_historic_formatting/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/gds_gets_over_histori...
      - cyberpunk 1y ago
        No, we are not afraid of our own systems. The idea that there is some fabled computer system which everyone is too scared to touch doesn’t exist (I work in payment processing). There are levels of controls way outside these systems which provide these safety nets (e.g settlement / reconciliation controls). If the cobol is still there, it’s not due to risk. If anything, the cobol is a much higher operational risk than replacing it.
throwaway2037 1y ago
> Working in investment banking, I never saw a single COBOL application What was the back office settlement or wire transfer system written in? There is a good chance that some part of them was written in COBOL. And while Bloomberg terminals are a vendor product, for a bloody long time, many of their screens had some COBOL. Also, lots of quantitative software at i-banks use LINPACK or BLAS, which use FORTRAN.
- zabzonk 1y ago
  Well, I had a very badly specified project to write a library for our back office systems to do Swift payments from our C++ applications, via COM. There was no obvious COBOL involved, on either side, but it has to be said that the whole use case for the library was very murky. And it never worked, due to the lack of spec, not the languages.
umpalumpaaa 1y ago
First hand knowledge: ERGO and MunichRE both have a lot of cobol still doing the core business. You will most likely never run into the system because they just run batch jobs - sometimes configured via a “nice” web UI… you configure your job, submit and the next morning you have your report… that’s why you never actually see COBOL.

ffsm8 1y ago

Cobol is used in pretty much all enterprise legacy systems. But "used in" doesn't mean that it's actively being developed by more then a tiny team for maintaining it. As this graph we're commenting on is mostly talking about popularity/most used it's never going to rate higher, because for every one Cobol dev there are more then 100 Java devs employed by the same company

cyberpunk 1y ago
That's a pretty wild claim. What's legacy for you? I'd consider legacy e.g J2EE crap running on web[sphere|logic] as holding most of the points in that league table vs COBOL.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  A legacy software to me is whatever the company that employs me says is said legacy software. Pretty much every business I've worked at to date has had such legacy software, which was inevitably still used in some contexts. It's not always obvious, because - following with the previous example numbers - only 1-2 Java devs will have to interact with the legacy software again, hence from the perspective of the remaining 98, Cobol doesn't exist anymore.
- lief79 1y ago
  If they're talking about Cobol, it's usually systems originating before the early 90s that haven't been completely rewritten. J2EE would be late 90s and 2000s.

BoredPositron 1y ago

I can only speak to the two bigger German banks (i.e., Sparkasse and VR banks), but if you look at their outsourced development providers (Atruvia and Sparkasse Informatik), they're still offering incentives for their apprentices to learn COBOL, especially in the german dual apprenticeship programs which they can steer more easily than university courses. My wife has been doing COBOL for one of them since 2012, and the demand has never diminished. If anything, it's increased because experienced developers are retiring. They even pull some of these retired developers back for particularly challenging projects.

cyberpunk 1y ago
Sparkasse and VR aren't the two largest German banks. DB is at least double the size of Commerzbank which is again 100mn in assets ahead of DZ. I don't find it all that surprising that these small banks are still trying to keep their legacy systems alive, but it's not the case for the bigger boys. (Source: work for several of them)
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  You are right if we only talk about assets. Should've clarified I meant more in regards of retail customers and branches.
  - cyberpunk 1y ago
    Oh, right, consumer banks. Yes I can imagine they're all extremely legacy bound. They're a very small percentage of banking, though.