[HN Gopher] COBOL- still standing the test of time
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COBOL- still standing the test of time
Author : isaacfrond
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-09-15 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.microfocus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.microfocus.com)
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| >> While many also debate the status of Java in relation to COBOL
| for business applications, COBOL remains the preferred choice for
| systems where application quality and operating cost remain
| important considerations, so often the case when addressing the
| ever-present issue of IT debt. When many businesses are facing
| mounting IT debt, the average cost per line of code for COBOL was
| projected to be PS0.80 whereas the cost to address Java quality
| issues per line of code was PS3.47, according to a recent IT
| study.
|
| "That oil in the fryer at your local bowling alley that has gone
| rancid but they refuse to change it because the guy who knew how
| to drain the old oil quit - still standing the test of time"
|
| While many also debate the status of new oil in relation to
| rancid oil for french fries, rancid oil remains the preferred
| choice for deep fryers where knowing how to change the oil and
| cost remain important considerations, so often the case when
| addressing the ever-present issue of stuff only Bill knew how to
| do. When many bowling alleys are facing mounting problems due to
| not making sure someone else could drain the oil besides 'their
| Bill', the average cost per gallon of oil for rancid oil already
| in the fryer was projected to be PS0.00 whereas the cost to go to
| Costco and get 15 gallons of new oil was PS8.73, according to
| Chelsea who is at Costco like every day.
| theshetty wrote:
| I started my career with a first job in 2009 (not long time ago!)
| as a COBOL/JCL programmer (and went on to do TELON programming
| later) for one of the biggest retailer in the country.
|
| The systems that managed the forecasting for replenishable and
| non-replinshable products, markdowns (i.e., discounts) on
| products in the stores, stock warehouse etc. across the country
| was completely built on COBOL/JCL+DB2 stack combined with TELON
| online screens for business to manage the solution/system.
|
| This system practically worked round the clock with hardly any
| downtime, and in the peak season (like Christmas when the
| sales/transactions were at it's high) too worked without any
| major issues. I'm sure IBM still earns a big chunk of revenue
| from mainframes from these big customers.
|
| I remember an attempt was made to migrate some (if not all) to a
| new generation data analytics platform and it didn't go very
| well, so they just stuck with what they had.
|
| One of the main reason I can think of is the the cost of this
| migration was too high (vs. the realised benefit) as the system
| just worked for the business and was quite resilient.
|
| I since then jumped ship to the very technology they were trying
| to migrate too and have never looked back really. I think I can
| still work my way out of COBOL/JCL + TELON/CICS, perhaps I will
| forget them very soon :)
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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?
| slivanes wrote:
| I was one of the kids that cracked their head open rocking on a
| chair (in grade 2), and I have also programmed some COBOL
| although not commercially.
| splistud wrote:
| More than a hundred, probably less than 500
| pjdemers wrote:
| I used to do consulting in banks. I met several Cobol
| programmers. However, they thought of their role as CICS
| programmers. CICS is a mainframe transaction management tool.
| All of them also did assembly in CICS.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| I knew a small department of cobol programmers. I worked one
| bay over from them in the mid 90's. They had a million+ line
| program that did the payroll for a major aerospace company.
| Honestly, it seemed like they had a pretty good job. Decent
| pay, decent benefits, decent hours, not much stress, no ageism,
| etc .. a great way to raise a family.
| philipswood wrote:
| I met some Cobol programmers in an open office space at a bank.
|
| Pleasant, relaxed bunch.
| Kaytaro wrote:
| My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a
| lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect,
| but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these
| roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems
| world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I
| have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's
| job" so maybe that's it.
| jcranmer wrote:
| From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry
| in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became
| very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.
| dralley wrote:
| It started a little earlier than that, but yes.
| aksss wrote:
| Not that it's germane to gender-balance of 'greyhairs', but
| COBOL was invented by a woman, Grace Hopper, after all. I'm
| not sure I can think of a new mainstream language initially
| authored by a female these days.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I worked at an investment bank in the 1990s. Their
| programming staff (and IT staff in general) was roughly half
| female. I think it's more common in companies where IT is a
| supporting function and not the core business. By contrast,
| the tech companies I've worked at have all been almost
| entirely male.
| flomo wrote:
| I've read that IBM offered training programs to secretaries,
| so it was a good career path. And there was a stereotype that
| typing = woman's work.
| forinti wrote:
| I worked with some at a bank (of course).
|
| Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server and it's incredible
| how some old names in IT can still charge enormous fees for
| some very old software.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server
|
| No it isn't. But I grant that there are probably people who
| incorrectly call their 1U servers "mainframes".
| dralley wrote:
| No, that is not even remotely close to being true. Pretty
| much every aspect of a mainframe is architecturally massively
| different from a big rack of standard servers.
| brundolf wrote:
| I think the field of tech is more segmented than many realize
| (in terms of culture, technology, even geography to an extent)
|
| For example, I've got a decent-sized network and I've only ever
| met one person who works in government tech. And it wasn't
| through that network. But you can't tell me the government
| doesn't have legions of people working on its systems.
|
| Even talking with this friend about work is like speaking
| another language. He builds, tests, and manages huge digital
| systems, but all of it is done using this product called
| Microsoft Dynamics, which I'd never even heard of. He doesn't
| really write any code, but the medium he works in is as complex
| and powerful as a programming language ecosystem. Yet there's
| almost no crossover between the jobs each of us might apply
| for. It's like an uncanny, alternate universe, coexisting with
| the one I live in. I think there are many such universes and
| it's entirely possible to go through your career without ever
| meeting someone from one of the others.
| jl6 wrote:
| 100%.
|
| SAP is another ERP parallel universe, with its own language
| (ABAP), industry certification schemes, conferences,
| publications, culture...
|
| These vendors specialize in solving the nexus of unfun
| problems that sit at the heart of every large organization
| (invoicing & expenses, accounting, payroll, budgeting &
| forecasting, financial statements...) and I believe them to
| be quite well insulated from the forces of open source and
| consumerization that have shaped the wider industry, because
| there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an
| alternative. Workday has come closest.
| aksss wrote:
| > because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an
| alternative
|
| I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience
| is highly risk-adverse, and the problem domain is highly
| risk-prone. There's an enormous incentive to go with an
| industry "known good" even if you know you're getting
| thrown over a barrel.
|
| ERP conversion are highly, highly likely to fail in terms
| of on-budget, on-time (more so than the general abysmal
| record of IT projects). Lack of business
| ownership/knowledge of processes and requirements is
| usually at the heart of it, IME. I've been through a couple
| SAP implementations, a couple SAP upgrades, and conversions
| to other platforms in my earlier life (Deltek, Dynamics),
| and they are truly the worst projects on the planet to do.
|
| In the government contracting space, Deltek (which most
| have never even heard of) is such a winner with accounting
| departments because they're playing to government auditors
| - the level of scrutiny from just saying "we run Deltek"
| compared to some roll-your-own solution is miles of
| difference and ultimate cost. I don't have any relationship
| with or love for Deltek, btw, this is just my IRL
| observation and an example of what the "customer" is
| thinking about - they could care less about technology
| stack.
|
| I think most finance departments just "mind the machine"
| they have - it's really rare (again, IME) to find people in
| a finance department who have expert knowledge of the key
| business processes, report audiences/dependencies, and how
| everything ties together. You can throw a ton of business
| analysts at it and still find dark corners that went
| unaddressed after or the night before go-live. And you're
| impacting things like payroll, benefits calculations,
| vendor payments, invoicing, taxation, etc. High risk stuff
| to kludge up.
| mhh__ wrote:
| One of things I really like about working on the D
| programming language is there sheer depth of characters I
| have met through it. We are all of a similar mould but we
| often come from very different backgrounds and paths.
|
| For example: Hedge fund traders, Game Engine lead devs,
| scientists, profession esports players, aerospace engineers
| etc.
|
| I particularly enjoy that D has given a bunch of smart people
| with no qualifications a venue to do what they love and get
| paid a small fortune doing it.
| garyrob wrote:
| I wrote a lot of COBOL "back in the day" (the 80's) and I don't
| think it would take me much effort to get back up to speed. So
| I think I can fairly count myself as a COBOL programmer!
|
| That being said, I like languages that came later much more,
| and absolutely would not choose to create a project today using
| it. I also wrote a lot of Pascal in the 80's, then moved to
| C/C++ and Python. Python is the language I've used the most in
| the 2000's, but now I'm studying Typescript, and think that is
| a perfectly fine language which I plan to use professionally.
| I've also studied OCaml and Rust and would absolutely choose
| the latter now for anything where efficiency was a prime
| requirement.
| habibur wrote:
| This article is from 2012, 9 years old. Thing might have changed
| a lot after that.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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 against taking any contract work,
| telling me that once she retired, a switch flipped in her head -
| she could never go back to work, not for all the money in the
| world. Good for you, mom.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| cyberCleve wrote:
| 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.
| Zababa wrote:
| They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as
| much or better for the average developer than Java, there
| would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Good point. Maybe new developer salary is different from
| what contractors get? The number I see for contractors are
| pretty good but yeah they have decades of experience under
| their belt.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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, COBOL work is kinda crap. Debugging 20-year-old Java
| code sucks, but a 40-year-old COBOL project, with source
| code backed up to 5-inch floppy disks - forget about it. (I
| just watched the trailer for 'The Many Saints of Newark'.
| LOL)
| [deleted]
| mathgorges wrote:
| I originally got into mainframe tech through IBM's annual
| _Master the Mainframe_ program [1] which got me limited
| access real mainframe on some college 's campus and IBMs
| manuals.
|
| The old -- and likely not so bad -- advice if you'd like to
| learn how to use a Mainframe is: Get access to a one, get a
| copy of latest Red Book [2], and start playing around :)
|
| [1]: https://www.ibm.com/it-
| infrastructure/z/education/zxplore (this isn't the program I
| went through, but my old bookmark now redirects here)
|
| [2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html
| (IBMs mainframe Technical Guides traditionally have a red
| cover)
| dagw wrote:
| They are. The largest bank here in Sweden for example offers
| a 6 month free COBOL Academy to newly graduated students,
| that ends in basically a guaranteed job.
|
| I guess there just aren't enough takers.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| That's very good. I never saw these in Montreal. Maybe
| because I'm not a new graduate.
| FpUser wrote:
| When my friend immigrated to Canada he quickly realized that
| one of the fastest ways to make decent money (he is not an
| entrepreneur) is in IT. Being very intelligent guy he decided
| that there should not be too much of a problem for him to
| learn programming. To my surprise out of various areas he had
| chosen to do COBOL stuff. Long story short - he has very
| secure employment, not the top but very nice salary and zero
| worries.
| 656565656565 wrote:
| Article is 2012.
|
| Edit: please add (2012) to the title.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| If a system is not really changed a lot, if the attitude is to
| keep what is currently working and avoid risk of anything
| breaking through change, then I ask: What is that "test of time"?
| What is it, that needs to be stood here? If nothing new is
| introduced to the system, then most likely it would still work in
| thousands of years. That is no achievement in itself. All
| deterministic software does this.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > All deterministic software does this.
|
| That stands to reason, yet much software is decomissioned or
| replaced every year. All of it deterministic software. Perhaps
| the software is expensive to maintain or use, doesn't
| adequately meet the needs of the business, is error-prone, or
| any one of a million reasons.
|
| COBOL works at the heart of our industry and our society,
| despite COBOL being an ancient crufty language. In the same way
| that may of us never see our hearts or become heart surgeons, I
| may never meet a COBOL program or a COBOL programmer. I am
| still thankful they are there, and I recognize they serve a
| function other software likely would not.
| giantg2 wrote:
| [announcer] Get ready to Rumba!!!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| COBOL Forever!
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
| bluejekyll wrote:
| 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 considerations". How much is COBOL being
| "chosen" vs. COBOL is basically required b/c of the existing
| codebase and systems that need to be integrated with?
|
| The latter is my guess, and the choice seems to be really,
| "what's the best way to extend this existing system?" If that
| system is in Java, it's probably Java... C it's probably C...
| COBOL it's probably COBOL.
| haswell wrote:
| 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 it surprising at first
| how cavalier some orgs are about ripping/replacing core
| services in the name of "modernization". Move fast & break
| things and all of that...
| loganfrederick wrote:
| As someone who was recruited to a financial firm a year ago
| to execute a modernization effort, I think the difference is
| due to (simplified) two types of firms: Big ones with huge
| moats often protected by regulators and profitability, and
| ones that are insecure. There is a pretty big population of
| companies that are at huge risk of being disrupted in the
| best sense of that term, and that's why they need to
| modernize. Many of these outdated core systems don't have
| modern capabilities, such as being desktop apps that can't
| integrate with the web or provide/use APIs without heavy
| refactoring anyway.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those big companies can be disrupted even faster if they
| break something though.
|
| I'm not allowed to talk about it, but I know people in
| tier-2 support who were on an all night phone call with a
| big bank customer because if the computer wasn't up by
| morning the government would shut them down. (somewhat like
| the government did shut down some big banks in the 2008
| crisis, but this was in the 1990s) At the start of the call
| the rep told them "We are pretty sure we know where the
| problem is and it isn't you, but we need you on the phone
| anyway just in case anyone has a question you are ready to
| answer." That is also why big companies have the million
| dollar support contracts: someone who can stay up all night
| and answer obscure questions.
|
| Break things is a bad thing sometimes. I wish more of the
| move fast and break things companies would realize who
| annoying it is when they break something.
| duxup wrote:
| I manage some ColdFusion apps still going strong.
|
| >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
|
| That's pretty much what it is. They're not hard to manage as
| they are and ... doing their thing.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Here's one I worked on over a decade ago:
|
| https://www.faculty.uci.edu/
|
| It's a little clunky, but still going strong!
|
| Honestly, I've found ColdFusion is a great solution for a lot
| of web development problems. It tends to break down with very
| complex apps, but for a lot of simple-to-mid comexity apps CF
| is great!
| forinti wrote:
| The thing about the "average line of code" is that a line of
| COBOL rarely does much.
|
| You can do a lot more with a line of Java and, of course, with a
| line of Perl or Python you can do very complex things.
| asien wrote:
| > 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 manner as opposed to << batch >> processing while covering
| and simplifying 90% of banks related scenario ( SEPA , MasterCard
| , AML etc...)
|
| The project was accepted by directors but devs refused to go into
| that because much like the authors they are 30 years in the banks
| and don't want to learn something else than what they know <<
| cobol >>.
|
| 90% of our contractors work is spent dealing with mainframe
| constraint and writing interfaces and top of that piece of crap
| that can only process data at night or during the weekend.
|
| Mainframe is not there because << it's superior >> , distributed
| system have largely proven their capability and maturity.
|
| Mainframe are still there because of Corporates Politics and lack
| of Leadership from top management.
|
| 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.
|
| Has nothing to do with it's capability , period.
| oneplane wrote:
| It's funny how it's presented as "standing the test of time".
| There is plenty of "old stuff" that still exists and those aren't
| tested by time either, it's just that there is not enough of an
| incentive or foresight to do something about it.
|
| If general OOP-language software engineers had the same army of
| QA, PR, marketing and sales people that mainframes have you'd
| probably end up with the same thing. I'd say COBOLs continued
| existence isn't the main case, it's just a side-effect.
| wsh wrote:
| Micro Focus is one of the main suppliers of COBOL compilers, so
| it's not surprising that they would argue that the language is
| still relevant.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Gonna take up IBM mainframe courses this year to see if I can
| learn more about mainframes. This architecture ia completely
| different from PCs and it's nice to learn new types of low level
| programming.
| 656565656565 wrote:
| Master the Mainframe usually is around this time of the year,
| recommend it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah exactly. I read sometime before they changed the name
| but the content sholdd be the same.
| pjmlp wrote:
| IBM and Unisys have their manuals online.
|
| IBM Redbooks are quite good.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah I saw a full set of redbook manuals regarding low level
| sys prog and amazed by its quality.
| tegansnyder wrote:
| I went to community technical college in 2005 and the primary
| course load was COBOL and JAVA. The college was a pipeline to to
| bring fresh COBOL talent into these big financial institutions.
| I'm not sure how many colleges are doing this across the USA
| currently, but I'm sure there are a handful.
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