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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?

#151

Post by jonathanlydall »

gosub100 wrote: post #136
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.

I can’t remark on COBOL, but I did contracting for a time to non-US insurance company replacing their Universe Basic system originally written in the mid 90s, with a .NET Core (3.1 had just come out at the time, around 2019) based system.

The system contained records of all their policies including all the premium factors (e.g. make, model, year of car, parking location, physical address, etc). These premium factors were then fed into a rating engine which would use actuarial tables with custom actuarial defined algorithms to determine premiums.

In insurance companies, working out the correct premium is core to everything. Insurance companies can have lots of different products and their competitive edge comes from how well they structure their offerings and determine the correct premiums based on risk factors. One does not simply rewrite such a thing.

Couple of things I thought were a bit interesting about the place:

- Their single server running Universe Basic (with a hot spare I believe) had 4TB of RAM. - While I was used to the devs being the stars of the show at the consulting house I worked at, at insurance companies it’s the actuaries.

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

#152

Post by ASalazarMX »

hnurl wrote: post #133

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…

What is crazy is how simpler is working with mainframes that host nation-wide apps, compared to developing a modern web app..

People joke about old coders brought out of their retirement to maintain a dusty COBOL/RPG program, while the reality is that the tooling is simple enough that a young developer could learn them in a month, and master in less than a year.

Plus, the expertise is not lost after a few years, given the platform focus on incremental improvement, and backwards compatibility.

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

#153

Post by jmbwell »

zeeframe wrote: post #80
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 ?

Not a dumb question at all! In Europe I’ve seen a few training programs held by companies looking to get new talent in to learn from the older techs. Browse around and see if any companies around you have something like that. There are some free resources available that will allow you to get training but I haven’t tried them myself. IBM Z Xplore is worth a look as an example: https://www.ibm.com/products/z/resources/…

I’ve run through a bunch of ZXplore and it’s more fun than I expected.

They have it hooked in to VS Code now. It’s weirdly modern. And you get to play on a real z machine.

Recommendable summer/holiday tinkering project. It’s amazing how much and yet how little has changed in computing and transaction processing.

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

#154

Post by ASalazarMX »

justin66 wrote: post #83
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…

In my experience mainframes at financial institutions are hidden behind IBM middleboxes that are specifically designed to obviate the infrastructure risks. It's a classic example of a company selling you both the problem and solution.

That's just an example of incremental improvement. Mainframes and midranges adapt with the times without losing what works. Modern midranges, for example, can run C, Python, bash, and web servers.

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

#155

Post by Rendello »

donatj wrote: post #21
degamad wrote: post #7

I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services. Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.

Anything in particular you're replacing them with generally? I heard a story about replacing COBOL with JavaScript ... and my skin still crawls thinking about it.

But think of the flexibility, freed from the shackles of numerical coherence!

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

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

#156

Post by haiku2077 »

kragen wrote: post #132
haiku2077 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

I intentionally use 256 colors mode because I prefer the vibe :)

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

#157

Post by zero_shift »

gosub100 wrote: post #136
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.

Insurance is largely about pricing risk. At the heart of most insurance platforms is a risk engine of sorts that takes a list of parameters and produces a premium.

The better your risk models, the more easily you can offer competitive premiums without over-exposure.

(I have worked in insuretech. Although my work was on transactional services and our white labelling capabilities rather than the math heavy stuff)

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

#158

Post by jp42 »

In undergrad(around 2005) we used to have a COBOL lab, most of the assignments were pretty much add/update/delete types. A friend of mine found COBOL so boring, in order to keep it interesting he wrote COBOL program for brothel(not real one), to maintain the customers, prostitutes, transactions and whole nine yard. Despite of not liking the language, he was the best COBOL programmer in college.

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

#160

Post by gwbas1c »

bob1029 wrote: post #137
gwbas1c wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

That was a very serious response to an off-the-cuff joke.

BUT: Please, oh please, write up a blog entry! I bet that would be fun to read.

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