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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

#21

Post by rodgerd »

jeremyjh wrote: post #7
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!

I think the moat that COBOL developers have is not just their knowledge of the language, but knowledge of the mainframe programming and operating environment. Its just so alien to developers familiar with Windows/Linux, and there is really no way to get experience with the environment that I know of, other than to be employed doing it. But yeah that stuff is never going away as far as I can tell. Its just too risky t…

About a decade ago I looked into moving some COBOL components off-mainframe (either as COBOL-on-Linux or a rewrite into Java, which itself is really COBOL Mk II at this point), and your point about the operating environment is one of the key elements, but not all of it; there's also the fact that the first big shift to automation, via mainframe assembler and COBOL, is when companies sacked a lot of the folks who knew how and why the pre-automation processes worked - that knowledge exists in the mainframe code and the heads of the people who work(ed) on it, and nowhere else. A rewrite or a replatform is very, very hard and risky as a result; the system is now defined by how the mainframe runs the processes, to a very large degree.

The third is that COBOL is only the tip of the iceberg. As soon as I spent time learning about the code I was being asked to look at, you get into decades of evolving programming practises. Modern COBOL is multithreaded, probably uses DB2 and relational datamodels. COBOL from thirty years ago is probably single-threaded, only runs right on high-clocked single-execution models, cuts down to hand-written s390 assembler regularly, and uses VSAM files with non-relational data. Older code still will be sharing data simply by banging it into memory regions for other code to read out of, because that's how you got performance back in the day.

Trying to identify how you'd pull a function out of that and move it off is somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. It's usually so complicated and expensive it's easier to try and hire people who want to apprentice as mainframe programmers and keep the current codebase running.

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

#22

Post by exhilaration »

amelius wrote: post #8
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!

Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?

IBM offers just such a service under the WatsonX branding, it's an LLM to convert COBOL to Java: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z

I work at a company with a large COBOL codebase and this has been mentioned in a few presentations about our modernization efforts.

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

#23

Post by rodgerd »

mckn1ght wrote: post #13

Huh, so it mentions 4GLs… what generation would we consider rust/kotlin/swift then?

The modern analogue of 4GLs would be the promise of LLMs letting you write prompts so you don't have to learn a programming language; the promise of the original 4GLs like Pearl (not to be confused with perl) and Objectstar was to let you have non-programmers writing business logic without being COBOL or FORTRAN programmers.

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

#24

Post by adamc »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #15
mckn1ght wrote: post #13

Huh, so it mentions 4GLs… what generation would we consider rust/kotlin/swift then?

They haven’t been around long enough to even be considered in the running.

4GL was really more a marketing slogan than a true generation. The idea was something like "with third generation tools, you have to drive the car, making every turn yourself, with 4th Gen., you say "Go to the Ritz!".

It wasn't true, although they did make some operations easier in tangible ways.

Rust is a wholly different kind of thing -- not easier than, say, Java, but lots more control with better guarantees. It's more a systems programming language. 4GLs were all application-focused.

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

#25

Post by graypegg »

Animats wrote: post #14
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.

I mean, if you squint your eyes a bit, that could be SQL! So even if it's not COBOL, there's people out there writing in a vaguely english business programming language.

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

#26

Post by francisofascii »

IshKebab wrote: post #12
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.

There is typically a big difference between a consultant's hourly rate and a full time salary hourly rate.

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

#27

Post by Smar »

Animats wrote: post #14
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.

> print food if tasty?

Ruby is nice.

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

#28

Post by throw0101b »

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode last year, "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U

One reason COBOL systems have been around for so long is because they encoded business rules that need to be understood if you want to try to transfer them to a new system. From the podcast (~16m):

> Like when we're working in unemployment insurance, again during the pandemic, my colleague was talking with the claims processors week over week and we're trying to dissect it and figure out what's going wrong and clear this backlog and one of these guys keeps saying, “Well, I'm not quite sure about that answer. I'm the new guy. I'm the new guy.” And she finally says, “How long have you been here?” And he says, “I've been here 17 years. The guys who really know how this works have been here 25 years or more.”

> So think about. You know, going from doing some simple cool, you know, tech app, you know, easy consumer app to trying to build or fix or improve upon a system that is so complex that it takes 25 years to learn how to process a claim.

> That's sort of, I think, what needs to be on the table as part of this agenda is not just “can the tech be better?” But can we go back and simplify the accumulated like 90 years of policy and process that's making that so hard to make?

Also an observation on how decisions are sometimes made:

> And I think that there's a deep seated culture in government where the policy people are the important people. They do the important stuff and technology, digital is just part of implementation, which is not just the bottom of a software development waterfall. It's the bottom of a big rigid hierarchy in which information and power and insights only flows from the top to the bottom.

> And so it's problematic in part because the people who are doing the tech are really just sort of downstream of everything else and the power and ability and willingness to step up and say “Hey, we probably shouldn't do those 6,700 requirements, we should probably focus on these 200, get that out the door and then, you know, add edge cases as as later.” There's no permission really to say that.

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

#29

Post by refneb »

exhilaration wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?

IBM offers just such a service under the WatsonX branding, it's an LLM to convert COBOL to Java: https://www.ibm.com/products/watsonx-code-assistant-z I work at a company with a large COBOL codebase and this has been mentioned in a few presentations about our modernization efforts.

How did that go? My employer is going to try snd evaluate watsonx product. Have you had any luck converting large/complex COBOL modules ?

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

#30

Post by tombert »

You know, one of these days I really need to sit down and play with some of these "legacy" languages, like Fortran or COBOL or Ada or APL; languages that have certainly fallen out of popularity but are still used in some critical places.

It does make me wonder about millions and millions of lines of Java out there; Java has more or less eaten the enterprise space (for better or worse), but is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems?

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