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COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

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Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#11

Post by _old_dude_ »

bdjsiqoocwk wrote: post #4
cwbriscoe wrote: post #2

Started my career doing Y2K stuff in 1998 and I still touch COBOL here and there today. I have a 10,000 line CICS program that runs every 30 seconds that I wrote in 2010. It has never failed since.

I don't understand these "never failed" comments. Without further context, it's meaningless. If I write a python script and never change anything in its environtment or inputs, it won't fail either. That's not specific to cobol.

COBOL changes very slowly, once in a decade or two. Python does not offer support of a release for more than 3 years and a half [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#12

Post by IshKebab »

mbloom1915 wrote: post #3

almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!

That seems like a myth to me. I actually looked up COBOL salaries and they were a bit higher (like 20%) but definitely not enough to make them tempting.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#14

Post by Animats »

msla wrote: post #5

"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.

Nobody writes

    MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C ON SIZE ERROR STOP RUN.
any more.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#16

Post by psunavy03 »

mbloom1915 wrote: post #3

almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!

In COBOL implementations, it's generally not just knowledge of the language that makes you valuable, it's knowledge of the implementation at that particular organization. I'm not a COBOL dev myself, but I work with them, and part of the challenge is that everything is so uber-customized, tightly coupled, and there's 40+ years of undocumented business logic buried in the code.

It's like the old joke about the engineer being asked for an itemized bill: "Chalk mark: $1. Knowing where to put it: $4,999."

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#17

Post by the_af »

mbloom1915 wrote: post #3

almost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it? COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!

COBOL jobs are not particularly well paid in my country.

In any case, they would have to pay well by a large margin to justify working on dead boring legacy systems, too.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#18

Post by adamc »

Technologies die very slowly once things of economic value depend on them. COBOL probably isn't used from new projects very often, but the economics of ditching it aren't very good either. It already works. Rewriting things that work is a great way to create new problems at great expense, so institutions are hesitant.

Re: COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

#19

Post by ithkuil »

j0hnyl wrote: post #10
msla wrote: post #5

"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." —Tony Hoare COBOL is alive in that it keeps changing from era to era, to the point modern COBOL looks rather little like the 1950s COBOL everyone instinctively thinks about when they heard the term. It's as if we were still programming in Algol because Java had been called Algol-94 or something.

But are these legacy systems from the 70s, 80s, 90s using modern cobol?

When you hear about people being paid $X vs 10x$X to fix some cobol; is there a correlation between the age of the cobol system?
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