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COBOL – Still standing the test of time

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Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#71

Post by phoehne »

theshetty wrote: post #29

I started my career with a first job in 2009 (not long time ago!) as a COBOL/JCL programmer (and went on to do TELON programming later) for one of the biggest retailer in the country. The systems that managed the forecasting for replenishable and non-replinshable products, markdowns (i.e., discounts) on products in the stores, stock warehouse etc. across the country was completely built on COBOL/JCL+DB2 stack combine…

I was part of a team that wrote a paper for a customer on replacing 5 million lines of legacy COBOL code with either hand-written or machine-generated Java for a major system. The cost was in the mid 9 figures.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#72

Post by phoehne »

mhh__ wrote: post #12

Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? It seems like the teachers tale of someone cracking their head open while swinging on their chair - presumably they exist but there can't be that many of them?

Yes. I had to learn to read COBOL using VSAM to port reports to a Cognos product and Oracle. One of the COBOL devs pulled me aside one day after we were happy to get one of the reports down to a few minutes. (I'll gladly admit that Cognos was a big part of the run-time cost). He ran the legacy report on the mainframe and it took well under a second. Not saying that mainframes are better but I felt like we'd actually wasted our time polishing a turd (Cognos) instead of doing something useful.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#73

Post by briHass »

phoehne wrote: post #70
asien wrote: post #45

> Cobol remains the language of choice Sigh , those single liner that both illustrate the ignorance and the status of the author. I’m an enterprise architect in banking , 6 month ago I was hired for IT Transformation. My mission was very simple « move the bank the out of mainframe » In 2 weeks or so I presented a Kafka based runtime based with JVM contracts that would enable the bank to perform in a near real-time ma…

The thing is, you solved a very narrow problem to which there is already a solution (and has been) on the mainframe for 30+ years (MQ). The real problem is that in that COBOL code is 50 years of business rules smeared across millions of lines of code, adjusted for all the changes in law (sometimes applied retroactively) which impact how money is handled. It isn't that mainframes don't have message queues or can't int…

Yep. It's real easy as an architect to come in and propose an overall architecture that will work, but the rubber meets the road when you attempt to 'strangle pattern' your way out only to find the deep interconnected and undocumented business logic. You're also fighting the business by trying to wrangle SMEs that have no interest in helping or have long since moved on.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#74

Post by lenkite »

asien wrote: post #45

> Cobol remains the language of choice Sigh , those single liner that both illustrate the ignorance and the status of the author. I’m an enterprise architect in banking , 6 month ago I was hired for IT Transformation. My mission was very simple « move the bank the out of mainframe » In 2 weeks or so I presented a Kafka based runtime based with JVM contracts that would enable the bank to perform in a near real-time ma…

> and writing interfaces and top of that piece of crap that can only process data at night or during the weekend.

I worked on mainframes and this seems like some deliberate policy not a mainframe limitation.

Also your Kafka+Java architecture is unlikely to still be supportable in 2 decades. Will have the same problems with Java and Kafka in the future as you have with Cobol today.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#75

Post by SilverRed »

nsxwolf wrote: post #57
markus_zhang wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.

Pay me a lot of money and I’ll do it. I think they all want to pay like 5 figures though.

It seems to be all the same story. People talk about these huge pays and guaranteed jobs but the average developer is already getting a huge pay and has no problems finding work.

The pays for COBOL do not even look that compelling and you are walking down a dead end when these systems finally modernize. I wouldn't touch cobol for anything short of $300k and the promise of enough work that I could retire within a few years.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#76

Post by dboreham »

jcranmer wrote: post #36
Kaytaro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect, but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's job" so maybe that's it.

From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.

The change came about when it became possible to have your own computer (VIC-20, Spectrum, etc). This put computers into the hands of teenagers. Relatively few female teenagers wanted to spend all their waking hours hacking assembler. This meant that the intake to CS undergrad programs became dominated by young men who had been programming for 10 years already. The women who did take CS were now at a large disadvantage in terms of experience.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#78

Post by zeckalpha »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #65
bluejekyll wrote: post #6

I've always thought that the reason COBOL is still "popular" is that it became an entrenched technology many years ago, and the cost of replacement is high enough (and it works fine doing what it's doing) that no one wants to invest the time and money to replace it's usage. This quote made me pause though, "COBOL remains the preferred choice for systems where application quality and operating cost remain important co…

The sentiment ITT seems to be overly dismissive of the value of a system that can reliably run for decades. How many of the new Kafka systems being stood up today would you realistically expect to still be running in 2061? How reliably do you expect those systems to perform over that 40 year period? The trade offs are quite apparent, but the value these systems provide is perfectly obvious too. I’m not sure I buy the…

Confluent managed Kafka offers an SLA with a downtime of 20 minutes a month… for mission critical real time services (rather than async background processing) that won’t cut it.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#79

Post by catmanjan »

jimt1234 wrote: post #48
Zababa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.

The contract offers my mother received involved good money, but that was actually part of the problem. She got the impression that most of the managers at "Big Corp" had little/no regard for these "critical" systems; they were just looking to save their own jobs, either by way of a miracle worker (wave a magic wand and fix 40 years of tech debt in 3 months) or a fall guy (it's the contractor's fault, not mine). Also,…

It needs to be breathtaking money to be worth it when you take into account the risk of investing in a shrinking skill set

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#80

Post by charadeyouare »

asien wrote: post #45

> Cobol remains the language of choice Sigh , those single liner that both illustrate the ignorance and the status of the author. I’m an enterprise architect in banking , 6 month ago I was hired for IT Transformation. My mission was very simple « move the bank the out of mainframe » In 2 weeks or so I presented a Kafka based runtime based with JVM contracts that would enable the bank to perform in a near real-time ma…

> When you are reminded that Citibank lost 0.5 Billions because they spent 0$ on their UI, you may start to understand how much corporates world is rotten to its core and why mainframe is still there.

Mainframe is still there because crypto isn't yet.

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