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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

#71

Post by happyjim »

Key components of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service tax processing code (e.g., the "Individual Master File" or IMF) are written in COBOL and IBM Assembly Language.

There is an ongoing effort to refactor as Java. This will ultimately take years and cost $100s of millions of dollars. There is still a small but shrinking team of graybeards who can actually maintain the code, which has to be reprogrammed every year to accommodate changes to tax code.

See, e.g., IRS IT Strategic Plan documents, publicly available.

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

#72

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Muromec wrote: post #67
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people miss about COBOL. It's not like people are compiling COBOL and running it on Linux on an x86 box. They are running it on legacy operating systems (and hardware) which provide a different set of underlying services. It's a whole different planet.

A different kind of cloud you can say.

ha yes. There is actually a pretty cool product that is made by a division of Rocket Software named "AMC", it takes a COBOL app running on an IBM system and deploys it to a whole set of services on AWS. There are some smart dudes at that shop.

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

#73

Post by jl6 »

Suppafly wrote: post #48
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.

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

A great thing about being a programmer is getting to complain about the crappy requirements you have to work with. SQL, on the other hand, is not a program - it’s a precise specification of the result you want, in a format that lets the database engine write the “program” for you. Thus, writing SQL helps you appreciate the struggle to achieve good requirements, and there is a chance you will develop empathy for those cursed to write them.

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

#74

Post by Muromec »

gwd wrote: post #68
Muromec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah not really. People just started replacing COBOL with java and employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. It can also be upgraded in smaller chunks and finding enough developers for the tool is an important metric corporate is looking at. If anything, banks are actively optimizing for developer experience to make sure 60% of new hires don’t run away in the first year. If…

> ...employers are wise enough to hire people who are 30-40 years minimum from retirement. Um oh yeah, the reason we're hiring 20-year-olds is because we want to ensure we have lifelong support for the new system we're writing. Not because they're cheaper, they're still idealistic and naive, they'll work long hours for foosball tables and stacks, or anything like that...

In a place where you can imagine having COBOL, working long hours is frown upon and being idealistic beyond personal integrity isn't a good quality either. Not saying such places aren't cheap, as of course they are. Being cheap is their exact point.

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

#75

Post by sestep »

palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

This is a weird take. Sure, plenty of cool/nice things from old languages (e.g. variable-sized stack frames in Ada) get lost, and some then get rediscovered by future languages, potentially wasting effort. And I don't know COBOL, so maybe you're actually making a good point.

But I find that hard to believe. Does COBOL really solve all the same problems Rust is intended to solve? Is it as performant? Can it interface with native code from other languages in the same way? Does it have a usable and sane package manager built on top of a module system that facilitates composability and backward compatibility? Does it have a way to describe the shape of data and errors as ergonomically as Rust's algebraic data types?

Genuinely curious: as I said, I don't know COBOL. I'd find it extremely surprising if the answers to all these questions are "yes," though. Just as there are reasons COBOL is still used, there are also (good) reasons new languages have been created.

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

#76

Post by Muromec »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #72
Muromec wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A different kind of cloud you can say.

ha yes. There is actually a pretty cool product that is made by a division of Rocket Software named "AMC", it takes a COBOL app running on an IBM system and deploys it to a whole set of services on AWS. There are some smart dudes at that shop.

Doesn't surprise me at all, somebody out there should be smart enough to make good money on that and not be very loud about it either.

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

#77

Post by Muromec »

palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

Shell script is memory safe too, but you don't write anything longer than 100 lines in it for a reason.

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

#78

Post by Muromec »

sestep wrote: post #75
palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

This is a weird take. Sure, plenty of cool/nice things from old languages (e.g. variable-sized stack frames in Ada) get lost, and some then get rediscovered by future languages, potentially wasting effort. And I don't know COBOL, so maybe you're actually making a good point. But I find that hard to believe. Does COBOL really solve all the same problems Rust is intended to solve? Is it as performant? Can it interface…

Imagine having a shell script being called from a cron job that writes data in a bunch of tab separated memory mapped files (memory mapping happens when you configure the thing), but you have more files than memory. And all the shell scripts call and include each other and have global variables too.

And that underpins most of the critical infrastructure in your country.

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

#79

Post by palisade »

Muromec wrote: post #77
palisade wrote: post #70

Note: I'm getting some hate from others who think I would pick or prefer COBOL over a modern language. I wouldn't. I was making an outside-the-box "devil's advocate" objective observation. I just wanted to preface that here. Okay, the rest of my original comment remains below: The irony is that we already had a memory safe and stable language in Cobol that was easier to read and understand than Rust. But, no one want…

Shell script is memory safe too, but you don't write anything longer than 100 lines in it for a reason.

When you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Healthcare, COBOL. Social Security, COBOL. Point of Sale, COBOL. IRS, COBOL. Pension funds? COBOL. Hotel bookings? COBOL. Payroll programs? COBOL.

It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more than 100 lines.

This was why Y2K genuinely scared everyone and was a very real problem. The only reason we can look back at it and laugh now is that an army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.

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

#80

Post by bespokedevelopr »

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 work for a major utility and they used to run everything on mainframe and cobol but that went away long before I started programming. My coworker is nearing retirement, around 30 years here, and he started on cobol and worked on transitioning off. He has some really fun stories but my point being, the tales of cobol prevalence are very exaggerated. Maybe some parts of finance are still using it, not my area.
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