Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 193 posts

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#101

Post by asymmetric »

znpy wrote: post #66
zeeframe wrote: post #18

I’m not a COBOL dev but I work with mainframes(z/OS). Most COBOL applications I’ve seen have been banking and insurance related with few exceptions. Most of them either run as a series of batch jobs or via transaction managers like IMS and CICS. Backends are usually sequential files(we call them datasets),DB2,VSAM(Virtual Storage Access Method) or DL/1(hierarchical DB that’s part of IMS). Quite a few places I’ve seen…

Dumb question: mainframes and z/OS look interesting, how does one get started with learning about those systems and those environments ?

This is a good article on the subject: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/the-i...

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#102

Post by ww520 »

ruralfam wrote: post #45

Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was j…

Ah. The birth era of creative accounting. I remember companies shipped empty CD and booked it as revenue for the quarter. The actual software when ready was delivered as a “patch”.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#104

Post by whistl034 »

mindcrime wrote: post #87
znpy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question: mainframes and z/OS look interesting, how does one get started with learning about those systems and those environments ?

There's an emulator called Hercules[1] that lets you run (some) mainframe stuff on a PC. There are limits to what you can run on it though, mostly due to licensing issues with IBM. You can also look at the IBM Redbooks site[2]. Search for terms like Z/OS, MVS, CICS, DB/2, etc. and you'll find a lot of IBM books, whitepapers (well, they call them redpapers, but whatever) and so on. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…

I've setup Hercules on my Mac before. Fun tool, since I last touched OS2/MVS 40 years ago. Best part is many of the old OS's (MVT, MVS, vm/370) are all still available since IBM never saw the need to copyright them.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#105

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ksherlock wrote: post #90
slowmotiony wrote: post #37

I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there wa…

Damn mainframe people flaunting their 16 colors like they're a peacock or something. Shit. We only had one color (and one absence of a color) and that was good enough.

16 colors is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic screens.

(paraphrased: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...)

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#106

Post by Cthulhu_ »

datpuz wrote: post #57
abdullin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew to like migration projects like that. Currently working on migration of 30yo ERP without tests in Progress to Kotlin+PostgreSQL. AI agents don’t care which code to read or convert into tests. They just need an automated feedback loop and some human oversight.

I would argue that they need heavy human oversight

For sure; I'll believe that an AI can read and "understand" code, extract meaning and requirements from it, but it won't be the same as a human that knows requirements.

Then again, a human won't know all requirements either; over time, requirements are literally encoded.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#107

Post by nobodyandproud »

nmcfarl wrote: post #8
andrelaszlo wrote: post #2

I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.

My stepmom who retired five years ago, did COBOL dev as part of her banking job until 2002ish and then she was full-time management track. In her bank, most of the work had been integrated with Java, and the Java was done by outsourced Indian teams. At the time she retired she felt the Indian teams had been failing for years to meet objectives, and finally management was seeing it. Additionally everybody who knew the…

I can imagine the conversation involving something along the lines of “don’t ever call me.”

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#108

Post by forinti »

jamesponddotco wrote: post #70

My brother works with COBOL for a bank here in Brazil, he is young (in his 20s), started before finishing his degree. Pay is poor, hours are insane, he is overworked as hell, and anything “modern”, like git, is out of the question. He’s trying to learn Go now and modernize himself to see if he can get out. I’m trying to help as much as I can. Hopefully, he’ll land a job somewhere else this year.

I can't understand why a financial institution would underpay someone who has such responsability.

The recent hacking of BMP shows the risk this creates (poorly paid employee with debts sold his password to hackers).

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#109

Post by nobodyandproud »

accrual wrote: post #51
machiaweliczny wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's surprisingly a lot of finance related jobs in TypeScript. I wonder what libraries they are using for money management.

Indeed, I've worked on billing system that relied heavily on pure JavaScript. Not even modern flavors with map/reduce, etc. - ECMAScript 5. It worked surprisingly well and our bottleneck wasn't the runtime but rather the databases we were constantly upserting to. It sounds kinda crazy but with good change control, documentation, good relationship with the ETL team - it was pretty maintainable.

Any chance it uses Rhino?

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#110

Post by compiler-guy »

nine_k wrote: post #11
actionfromafar wrote: post #4

Maybe the COBOL devs aren’t here.

HN is a place where everyone is, so it's reasonable to assume that some Cobol devs may also lurk here.

Shout out to all the MUMPS programmers out there reading HN. May your code always be healthy.
Post reply on HN