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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?

#91
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?

She says it's both. By new stuff, it's mostly one off programs that handle small changes to the way billing or claims are handled. It sounds like they have a library of programs to start with and she extends it to fit the new edge case.

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

#92
post #40
post #24

I know some COBOL devs. They work in a bank. They wouldn't hang around here though.

Where would they hang around? Curious to learn about other programming/tech communities

There's a somewhat active community of COBOL developers here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cobol/

If you're every really bored, search around the HN archives to find out how I accidentally founded that community as a result of a joke. :-)

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

#93
I don't code in Cobol myself anymore but I manage team who does.

We work on Phoenix, government of Canada payroll system. If you google it up, you'll see some interesting coverage. However, the underlying peoplesoft ERP itself is rock solid at every other client I've served over last 25 years. Peoplesoft uses Cobol and sqr, as well as proprietary languages stored in database, application engine and peoplecode.

Key payroll processes are in Cobol. This is because of its tight integration with database and ability to manually control database cursors. We are very database oriented when it comes to performance. Our developers need to know the programming language, but also deep understanding of client business processes, and sql optimization. They also work closely with our dbas to ensure good performance. So our developers are technically proficient in Cobol and couple of other languages, but also very very strong in sql optimization, and understand clients payroll rules and can speak intelligently with compensation advisers and payroll processors.

I personally found that to be true for most Cobol programmers - whereas typical hacker news Dev seems very technology oriented and frequently moving, typical Cobol programmer is very business process aware and integrated with corporate line of business. They don't move as much for several reasons, but that deep awareness of client is one of them.

Edit: I shoild mention, while peoplesoft can and does work on mainframe, most of my clients are on windows, Linux, or AIX. COBOL is not quite as mainframe specific as it sometimes seems :-). See e.g.microfocus Cobol for a modern multi platform compiler.

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

#94

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 work with developers who code on OS 2200 and VAX VMS (running on Charon emulation).

Fun fact: the first SMP UNIX implementation ran on top of EXEC 8, the kernel of OS 2200.

"Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/retro...

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114648/https://www.bell-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1100/2200_series

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

#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.

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

#97
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…

Oh yes, I remember that when we swapped out a bunch of terminals at an airline.. The users complained it was all way too slow on the new Windows machines with MS SNA server in between... I was wondering what it was all about, as a young and very naive dropout from uni on his first IT job. When I came down, this dude was banging on his keyboard and after some time stopped, pointed at the screen and you could see it sl…

That's awesome. I set up Arch Linux a while ago, and despite working in Linux shops for more than a decade, let's just say I was very out of my element...

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

#98
Apropos of nothing in particular, there's an older HN thread about "Good resources for learning COBOL" that some folks here might find interesting. OK, calling it a "thread" is over-stating things, but still...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479536

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

#99
post #76
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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