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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?

#171

Post by deepsun »

datpuz wrote: post #164
deepsun wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think efficiency of navigating your IDE is a major factor in your productivity. If you like your setup, it's probably not going to matter a whole lot. The tool you make money with is your brain.

Hard disagree.

Few points I can easily remember:

1. Navigating the code, e.g easily see all the callers, navigate up/down the call tree requires static code analysis. Super handy while reading someone's else code, which is like 90% on large projects.

2. Quick refactorings. Often times I see people discuss in lengths what would/could be instead of just go and try it out quickly, seeing all the pros and cons. Many times I proven myself wrong by trying it out and seeing pitfalls I didn't see earlier.

3. Warnings: so many real bugs could've been prevented if developers had seen (or cared about) to IDE showing a warning. Many PR review suggestions are detectable by a proper IDE without wasting reviewer's time.

4. Hotkeys (what the parent comment was talking about) -- speeds up all of that, especially refactorings, freeing dev's brain for thinking of architecture and other problems.

I can go on an on. Sometimes it feels like 50%+ of AI usage for coding is to free up fingers, not knowing that they were already mostly free by using static analysis features/hotkeys.

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

#172

Post by geoka9 »

datpuz wrote: post #164
deepsun wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think efficiency of navigating your IDE is a major factor in your productivity. If you like your setup, it's probably not going to matter a whole lot. The tool you make money with is your brain.

It pays to help one's brain stay in the flow, though, and fast and reliable muscle-memory-based navigation of one's IDE does exactly that.

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

#173

Post by smga3000 »

I've done COBOL since the 80s, but I don't have a paying gig for it anymore. That said, I have situations where I need to process a flat file of data, and I find it a lot easier to just fire up gnucobol and write the program than try to remember the syntax for python or golang.

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

#174

Post by janstice »

sethhochberg wrote: post #142
gosub100 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some less-common varieties of life insurance start to look a whole lot like investment products and are (sometimes controversially) sold as such for people in very specific financial situations - think like cash value and death benefit value that vary over time based on asset performance. A legacy insurer selling Variable Universal Life or similar policies would have some financial calculation needs.

And I guess if there’s a whole-of-life policy sold in 1962 that hasn’t been terminated - I guess there’s a lot of grandfathered rules that are just easier to keep in their original systems.

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

#175

Post by the_af »

kreetx wrote: post #49
the_af wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can LLMs do Cobol? I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do is mostly very straightforward batch processing. It's ripe for automation with LLMs. The flip side is that banks are usually very conservative about technology (for good reason).

I don't think LLMs are anything human language specific, so would they really shine here? I.e, COBOL and SQL may be great for humans who otherwise aren't used to programming languages, but LLMs have seen everything, and thus are able to know any (programming) language, not just ones which are English-like.

I think it would shine because COBOL is very verbose and the programs written with it (batch jobs) very straightforward but also very boilerplate-rish and boring to write by hand, a situation with little risk and high reward to automate.

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

#176

Post by p_l »

compiler-guy wrote: post #110
nine_k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's more MUMPS programming going around than many people believe, especially in financials...

Including new development.

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

#177

Post by glaucon »

jmclnx wrote: post #39
zoom6628 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex COBOL dev here. Started at NCR on COBOL for minis and mainframes. Then built stuff on Wang VS COBOL for ERP systems until 93. Quite a few other languages since then but been a Product Manager for past 20+ years.

Same here, I worked on Wang VS COBOL too. IMO, it had the best TUI Screen generation Tools I have ever seen. Towards the end, I worked on a project to port Wang VS OS and its COBOL to AIX. I was tasked finding issues with COBOL Programs we had on the VS. It was a good environment, but Wang went CPT 11 before it was ready :) It was rather close to being complete.

I worked on Wang VS COBOL too, great environment. Also worked on Wang PACE, their 4GL/RDBMS, the people who developed that stuff did a great job.

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

#178

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

datpuz wrote: post #55
mvdwoord wrote: post #52

Not a COBOL developer, but working at a sizeable bank I witnessed the phasing out of their mainframes and AS400 systems. They ran some critical systems, both in retail and wholesale banking. They either converted to java, and optimized that code, but some COBOL code from the mainframe, and all of the AS400 stuff was converted into Micro Focus COBOL, which runs on Windows, which could be hosted on our Private Cloud. I…

Can you describe the cultural gap? I haven't really met these folks in the wild, so I'm curious what the programmers of yore were like.

When I worked for a retailer whose logistics ran on IBM mainframes, one of the milestones was getting COBOL devs to use version control.

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

#179

Post by kldg »

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)

They may eventually learn the valuable skill of politely smiling and nodding as someone talks with great passion about things with zero relevance to their day-to-day life, assuming they don't shut up about it at home.

Actually, tbf, my daughter's pretty interested in my coding and electronics projects. She picks things up alarmingly fast. I taught her a practically-one-way encoding scheme for passwords I've had incredible trouble teaching anyone else (LLMs also can't figure it out), and she completely understood it after the second example I gave and even added her own extra twist to it. Her passwords now are both memorable and extremely secure against dictionary attacks even with any mutation scheme someone could reasonably imagine.

-So I think that should probably go in the plus column.

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

#180

Post by lstroud »

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…

It would be kinda cool if you’d create a CICS Hacker News UI. ;)
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