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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

#41

Post by psunavy03 »

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…

Migrations are still a thing, with various approaches and success rates.

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

#42

Post by ang_cire »

_w1tm wrote: post #33
ang_cire wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're actually patching your python installs, that is by no means certain.

I don’t think those mainframes running COBOL are getting patched either.

They absolutely are. Modern COBOL (even 25 year old COBOL) isn't running on ancient System360/370/390s or something, it's running on modern z/OS mainframes.

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

#43

Post by Suppafly »

tombert wrote: post #30

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 thin…

>but is there any reason to think that in 30-40 years the only people writing Java will be retirees maintaining old banking systems?

It feels like we're getting into that space already.

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

#44

Post by kibwen »

zozbot234 wrote: post #36
graypegg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The nice thing about a vaguely English like language is that your average LLM is going to do a better job of making sense of it. Because it can leverage its learnings from the entire training set, not just the code-specific portion of it.

Not for generating it, because the more it looks like prose the more the LLM's output will be influenced by all the prose it's ingested.

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

#45

Post by blastonico »

Soon after Java was released, when the hype around the language was on fire, people used to say that it was going to replace COBOL - due to the "build once run everywhere" motto. Java indeed gained market share in the finance industry, but COBOL is still there.

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

#46

Post by Muromec »

tombert wrote: post #30

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 thin…

Cobol is still there not because of cobol itself, but because of vendor and platform lock-in. And I guess having monolithic codebase/platform.

it’s not even esoteric and difficult, just a lot of it without much structure visible to you.

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

#47

Post by shadowgovt »

throw0101b wrote: post #28

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…

> ...add edge cases as as later.” There's no permission really to say that.

I think there would be some value to closing that feedback loop to give legislators the signal "You know, what you're considering is actually pretty fuzzy conceptually... We're discovering while considering how to code it up that you probably don't actually have good, clear definitions for all the terms in this bill." But the biggest thing to remember about government IT is the clientele, which changes the approach from commercial / industry software.

Google can optimize for the common case. Google can cut the edge cases. Google can change APIs on a whim.

Google's users choose to be Google's users and can go elsewhere if they don't like it.

Government citizens don't have that choice. And in general, people don't lose access to their food if Google effs up. Or go without their legally-deserved unemployment pay. Or go to jail because their taxes were mis-calculated.

In the government space, the "edge cases" are human beings, alike in dignity. The rules and policies end up complicated because human beings are complicated. And yeah, it ends up being some messy software. Because you can't just decide to ignore the law when it's inconvenient to plumb the information that the client has a child under the age of 18 who is not a dependent because they're an emancipated minor, but said emancipated minor does have a child of their own, and the client is the primary caregiver for that child while her parent is in prison... from here to there in the dataset.

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

#48

Post by Suppafly »

graypegg wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

seriously sometimes writing SQL feels more like composing a google query than programming.

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

#49

Post by Mc91 »

tombert wrote: post #30

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 thin…

I program an Android app for a Fortune 100 company. Last commit where someone edited a Java file was last week.

Most of the new code from the past few years has been in Kotlin though.

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

#50

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ithkuil wrote: post #19
j0hnyl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably not; just a matter of how desperate they are.
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