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COBOL – Still standing the test of time

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Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#91

Post by MuffinFlavored »

jimt1234 wrote: post #35

My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting part-time contract work, something to keep her busy. She got flooded by recruiters. They all told her the same story: "Big Corp" is nervous because a critical system runs COBOL and the staff that used to support it have all either retired or died. She decided a…

What’d she do to get over the boredom? Did she end up taking a different kind of job?

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#92

Post by tragomaskhalos »

haswell wrote: post #15
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…

I spent ~7 years or so at one of the large credit card companies. The adage "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" was very prevalent there, and anything that even hinted at touching the core payment processing code was scrutinized heavily and usually avoided entirely. At the time, the cost of an outage was estimated in the $100K's per minute, and is likely significantly higher now. When I moved away from FinServ, I found…

Some years ago, one of the UK's air traffic control systems needed to be uplifted off the deprecated hardware it ran on. Going anywhere near the code itself was a total no-no - even though there were known glitches, the risk of touching that code was just deemed too high. So they instead wrote an emulator for the old machine and ran the unaltered s/w that way. Never underestimate the power of legacy that works.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#93

Post by dzdt »

skissane wrote: post #87
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. That wasn’t actually on a mainframe or in COBOL, it was an Oracle app (Oracle Forms/Reports, PL/SQL, Java, etc). And, it was a product from an Oracle subsidiary (OFSS), the software itself was not maintained in-house. A…

The Oracle outsourcing connection is interesting! I read about this incident at the time in Matt Levine's column. [1] See HN discussion at [2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c... [2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180785

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#94

Post by dzdt »

lmm wrote: post #84
AmericanChopper wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The sentiment ITT seems to be overly dismissive of the value of a system that can reliably run for decades. In my experience it's a very narrow kind of reliability, where no-one cares whether the calculations are right as long as they're the same ones you've always run, and no-one's ever validated what or why is being calculated or sanity-checked it. Probably one of the vital constants in the system is 10x what it…

The Cobol code is mostly handling transactions that result in money going from one account to another. The people who own that money tend to scrutinize this very carefully! So after 40 years, pretty much any bug that occurs in practice has been squashed out of existence.

This doesn't mean that every function in the code works correctly for arbitrary inputs that appear to be allowed by the function interface (formally a bug!) but it does the right thing for the inputs that have historically been provided (in practice very stable and reliable).

That kind of reliability makes it hard to rewrite the code. There are cases for historically unused input combinations where you have no particular reason to believe the old code is bug free. So when your rewrite produces a different result in an obscure case, it is a long and painful business logic task to decide which version is right.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#95

Post by notimrelakatos »

cyberCleve wrote: post #54
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.

I would imagine part of the reason is because even if you have a trained COBOL maintainer, they still have to learn and understand the actual business logic of the application. Learning the language is not even half the battle. Maintaining old often undocumented code is a hard task in any language.

Indeed, I've once met someone who migrated a COBOL project to Java, the biggest complain wasn't even the Language itself, but extracting business logic from a 40-year old spaghetti codebase. Sometimes bugs where part of the business logic itself and other developers who consumed the monstrosity had to make corrections on their side.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#96

Post by skissane »

dzdt wrote: post #93
skissane wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That wasn’t actually on a mainframe or in COBOL, it was an Oracle app (Oracle Forms/Reports, PL/SQL, Java, etc). And, it was a product from an Oracle subsidiary (OFSS), the software itself was not maintained in-house. A…

The Oracle outsourcing connection is interesting! I read about this incident at the time in Matt Levine's column. [1] See HN discussion at [2] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c... [2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180785

It wasn't exactly classic outsourcing.

In the early 1990s, Citibank decided to outsource banking software development to India. Not an unusual decision, but somewhat unusual the approach to it they chose – they set up an Indian subsidiary (iFlex) to develop banking software for them, but also decided the subsidiary would sell the software as a product to other banks. So Citibank owned an Indian subsidiary which developed banking software both for Citibank and also for others. And then Citibank sold that subsidiary to Oracle in the 2000s, and Oracle renamed it from i-Flex to OFSS. Actually Oracle owns the majority of it but a minority of it is publicly listed on the stock exchange in Mumbai.

It isn't just one product, it is a whole suite of banking software applications. I know there are banks who have deployed just certain apps out of the suite and integrated those apps with their legacy core banking. Or, you can buy it all and use it for everything. Given Citibank is the original customer, I imagine they use more of it rather than less of it, but I’m just guessing.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#97

Post by cafard »

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?

Several, yes, but at this point the ones I know are all retired.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#98

Post by cafard »

phoehne wrote: post #72
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…

Cognos! I remember looking in amazement at the SQL generated by Cognos.

Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#99

Post by Lancemaria »

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Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time

#100

Post by markus_zhang »

catmanjan wrote: post #79
jimt1234 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it depends. On my side, I'm OK with a modest salary if it's stable for the next 10-20 years. I think mainframe fits perfectly. It's declining but not that fast. It's unattractive so you face little competition. It's just a hell lot hard to get in in the middle of your life.
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