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

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

#131

Post by countrymile »

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…

I used to work with the most amazing blind COBOL programmer on CICS code. His speed in finding and fixing code with a screen reader, was mind blowing.

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

#132

Post by kragen »

haiku2077 wrote: post #89
kazinator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PuTTY into Linux and you're in 16 colors.

My Linux terminal is 256 colors. Two hundred fifty six! That's like, every color!

24-bit color support (\033[38;2;rrr;ggg;bbbm) has been mainline in both Konsole and in libvte-based terminal emulators for many years. 16777216 colors. That's still not every color, but it's every color your monitor can display. When I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.c in 02016 I had it in Konsole but not libvte, though I think it had been added to libvte upstream. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gradient.png

Color in terminal emulators was one of the main perks of Linux over other Unixes for me at first!

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

#133

Post by hnurl »

I am working as a mainframe developer at a bank, currently within a kind of data warehouse solution. Mainly writing in COBOL and Java (in USS), with some scripting in Rexx for internal ISPF tools. A lot of SQL as well, we use DB2 as our main database.

Most of our processes are EOD centric, we run a lot of batch jobs (mainly TSO, very little IMS). Integrations are mostly file based but we do both call and expose APIs (“regular REST APIs”) as well as consuming from and producing to Kafka among other things. We integrate with both mainframe and distributed systems on prem as well as “internal” systems hosted on cloud.

We use Git for source control but have a CI/CD solution that is built in house. Quite a lot of other infrastructure is also built in house.

I am mid 30s and am on the younger side looking at the mainframe area as a whole at my employer, however in my team we have several developers is in their 20/30s.

My background is mainly back- and frontend development on the Microsoft tech stack but I have worked, and do work, with whatever is at hand/required. But mostly stuff like .NET and SQL Server on the backend, and Angular/Vue/React on the front end before this.

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

#134

Post by specproc »

coryrc wrote: post #122
perakojotgenije wrote: post #96

My father is 75 and he still works, has his own software development company with his own back-office program written in cobol. He started a company back in 1991 with two other cobol programmers, they are retired now, and while almost all of the code they wrote has been replaced with c# code by younger programmers there are still some parts of the code written in cobol that he still maintains.

Random OT question: I was raised by, erm, relatively uneducated folks. Is there anything especially great about having a software programmer for a father? (As my kids have one)

Having your kids also be technical and bail you out of the shit you've built for yourself. Or at least nudge you away from bad ideas, do listen to them.

I'm being a little unkind to my Dad. He moved to management fairly early on and didn't really keep up with things.

He taught me a hell of a lot though, and did really know his shit at one point. It worries me how much his skills and understanding have declined over the years.

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

#136

Post by gosub100 »

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…

What is the primary computational task for insurance? Is it computing actuarial tables? Or accounting for the premiums/claims? Or something else? I can excuse banking for not switching off of COBOL but I fail to see how insurance uses it to any significant degree.

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

#137

Post by bob1029 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #95
a3w wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can LLMs do Cobol?

I'm sure they can do brainfuck if you have a good training set.

LLMs are terrible at brainfuck. I spent a solid week attempting to use generative models to iteratively refine BF program tapes with nothing to show for it. I've written genetic programming routines that can produce better brainfuck programs than ChatGPT can.

For example, if I prompt ChatGPT: "Write me a BF program that produces the alphabet, but inverts the position of J & K" it will deterministically fail. I've never even seen one that produces the alphabet the normal way. I can run a GP algorithm over an example of the altered alphabet string and use simple MSE to get it to evolve a BF program that actually emits the expected output.

The BPE tokenizer seems like a big part of the problem when considering the byte-per-instruction model, but fundamentally I don't think there is a happy path even if we didn't need to tokenize the corpus. The expressiveness of the language is virtually non-existent. Namespaces, type names, member names, attributes, etc., are a huge part of what allows for a LLM to lock on to the desired outcome. Getting even one byte wrong is catastrophic for the program's meaning. You can get a lot of bytes wrong in C/C++/C#/Java/Go/etc. (e.g. member names) and still have the function do exactly the same thing.

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

#138

Post by deepsun »

james_marks wrote: post #99
FL410 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, it's usually lack of awareness about modern security risks, and lack of familiarity with modern infrastructure paradigms. The latter really isn't a problem since these systems are usually standalone, but the former does become a problem - they often are from a time where this just wasn't something to consider. As a result, these legacy systems are often using default passwords, have tons of crazy st…

Reminds of the DOS order management software I used in the 90’s. ASCII tables, text only, with F key shortcuts. Hard to learn but blazing fast once you did. Nothing modern approaches it.

Reminds me of modern IDEs -- developers, both old and new, are too lazy to learn a complex IDE to speed up their work, even though it's their main tool for making money.

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

#139

Post by FlyingSnake »

Not COBOL but years ago I did some work on IBM AS/400 using RPG. For those who don’t know, RPG was originally written (in 1959) for punch cards and the programs had to be written in a pattern that resembles punchcard. It was a fun experience and I am grateful to have dabbled in it.

Many megacorps still run AS/400 and it’s uptimes and performance is legendary.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I was mentored by folks more than twice my age that time.

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

#140

Post by FlyingSnake »

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…

I’ve built systems for iSeries and none of the modern fancy GUI IDEs come close to the speed of those IBM 5250 terminals. You can still see such terminals in action in POCO baumarkt in Berlin.

One of the modules I saw in action was written before the moon landing, written by a lady programmer.

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