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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?

#51

Post by accrual »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #33
donatj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#52

Post by mvdwoord »

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 worked on helping them migrate to our cloud infra, which was an interesting exercise. There was a very tangible cultural gap between the people maintaining and developing these applications and the rest of the organization.

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

#53

Post by Lyngbakr »

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…

Is it entirely maintenance or does she also build new stuff with COBOL?

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

#55

Post by datpuz »

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.

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

#56

Post by accrual »

the_af wrote: post #44
a3w wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can LLMs do Cobol?

> 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).

IMO the ideal path to working on COBOL without having decades of experience would be to spend a few days groking the syntax and writing toy programs for practice, then collaborate with a large LLM to understand the current code and gradually make changes.

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

#57

Post by datpuz »

abdullin wrote: post #25
mtmail wrote: post #20

Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel…

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

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

#58

Post by nstj »

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…

Thanks for your insight - it’s comments like this which make HN a place worth visiting every day.

And welcome!

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

#60

Post by kazinator »

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…

PuTTY into Linux and you're in 16 colors.
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