Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on? • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by JD1967 » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 1:15 PM UTC

I no longer develop in COBOL but I did for 20 years, and never touched a mainframe. I worked on a mid-size vertical ERP system (back then it wasn't called "ERP") that originated on Data General using Interactive COBOL, which is where the SCREEN SECTION originated.

The application (thousands of programs) were ported to Unix with a ICOBOL compatible compiler (no longer available) and then later to AcuCOBOL was absorbed by MicroFocus, but now looks like an independent company has revived it as an independent product (Rocket).

One of my projects was to rip out most COBOL I/O and replace with embedded SQL.

Later it was ported to Windows, and used the GUI controls available in AcuCOBOL. You'd have been hard pressed to tell the difference between those COBOL apps and any VB6 or WPF app on Windows. With embedded SQL, the GUI controls in the SCREEN SECTION, and COBOL p-code and memory management, it was actually a rather nice little 4GL type development system.

Many people who look down upon COBOL never actually used it. It had its flaws for sure, but it wasn't all that bad.

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

#192

Post by ralphc » Sat, Jul 26, 2025, 2:11 AM UTC

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, if any, advantages that VSAM, IMS or DL/1 have over the SQL databases we're more familiar with here?

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

#193

Post by gaws » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

RSHEPP wrote: post #35

My mother and her husband are COBOL devs for a US state government. She works on the health insurance side for teachers and other state employees. Think claim processing. Lots of batch jobs running at night. Their alert system is an actual human who calls my mom when jobs fail in the middle of the night. It's high paying for the city they live in, but not high paying for software development. They will both have full…

> They will both have full retirement and healthcare for life, assuming the government can fulfill it

Are they not worried about getting DOGE'd?