Slashdot Mirror
Modernizing the Common Language - COBOL
Frumious Wombat writes "Over at the Register Developers section, they are quoting the head of research for Ovum Consulting on the continuing dominance of COBOL in certain business applications. The antique language accounted for 75% of all business transactions last year, and some 90% of financial transactions. For all the time spent arguing the merits of Ruby vs. C#, should the community spend more time building tools to make COBOL livable? The article goes into what it terms 'legacy modernization', and lays out some details on how to go about it. From the article: 'The first stage in the legacy modernization process is to understand the business value embodied within legacy systems. This means that developers must give business domain experts (business analysts) access to the legacy, using tools that help them find their way around it at the business level. Some awareness of, say, COBOL and of the legacy architectures will be helpful but we aren't talking about programmers rooting around in code - modern tools can automate much of this analysis for staff working at a higher level.'"
Because, it makes sense.
You don't have to develop corporate variable naming standards, coding standards, and all that, because the language makes it happen automatically.
You can take a fresh wet behind the ears kid, give him the code, and he can figure out what's going on without any significant trouble, because it happens in order, there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
You want to add 2 and 2? Great, you get 4, which is what the accountants want. You can't program 2+2 to equal 27 like you can in C++. One operation does one thing, does it well and accurately, and moves on.
Business only has one real question: "How much money did I make last year?" COBOL provides all the tools to answer it.
That is why COBOL lives, and always will.
One, these figures result from the simple fact that COBOL was pretty much the only high-level language around at those pre-historic times many of the major applications were written. And banks are very, very conservative environments where something that works will not be thrown away for something that might have bugs, even if it's 10x as fast, easy to maintain or whatever. It has to work and that's priority #1, #2 and #3.
Two, the reason COBOL is so widespread in financial institutions has nothing to do with business sense and everything with business mind. It is "readable" to a business dude with zero computing experience. Something like "ADD PROFITMARGIN TO PRICE" just makes these people feel more at easy than "$price+=$p_margin".
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This simply underlines the fact that there's a huge workload of easy, routine transactions that need to be done.
In terms of total complexity, the financial world is probably something like Excel 20%, C# 15%, Java 30%, C++ 30%, other 5%.
But in terms of transactions, I can well believe it's COBOL 70%, REXX/VB/4GLs 25%, other 5%.
Modelling a CDO *is* hard, and you don't do it in COBOL. Creating a visual system to monitor liquidity *is* hard and you don't do it in COBOL. 'Transactions' pure and simple are not hard... you can do them in COBOL... they're easy to maintain because changes are of the form 'deduct 5% if broker_country_of_incorporation = finland'... and they're also a darn silly way to measure the relevance of a language.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Once you guys get jobs in the Real World, you will realize that businesses don't care about technology, they care about solutions.
No business person in their right mind would rewrite all their COBOL code into C or Java just for the sake of modernization. That would be foolish and stupid, and they would deserve to be fired from their jobs. Everything works, why change it. Financial institutions that have their entire livelihood based on these COBOL programs would rather upgrade their hardware and make THAT modern, but keep their legacy code. They already went through a multi-billion dollar fixing for the Y2K industry, that's more than enough for them. The next problem is either 2038 or 2050, when the Y2K issue is revisited because of how most companies implemented their "fix" (any date > 50 would be considered in the 21st century).
I was working at a bank during late 90s and during a building-wide Y2K meeting, one of the project managers was explaining to us how they implemented the solution. Someone in the crowd asked "Won't we go through this problem again in 2050?" He answered "Yes, but I'll be dead then, so I don't care."
That is how business people think... they care about solutions, they don't care about technology. Don't waste your time navel-gazing and trying to figure out brilliant ways of modernization COBOL, because no one who uses it cares. Keep your great ideas for the new ideas where the barrier to implementing new solutions and new technology is much lower.
The reason there is so much legacy code about is because that code has been around for some years, is proven and is bug free.
The slashdot article assumes that because of this the code may benefit from change. In fact the exact opposite is the case. Change introduces bugs and costs money, so I cannot see this happening.
The antique language accounted for 75% of all business transactions last year, and some 90% of financial transactions. For all the time spent arguing the merits of Ruby vs. C#, should the community spend more time building tools to make COBOL livable? The article goes into what it terms 'legacy modernization', and lays out some details on how to go about it.
I mean, it's only big (huge!) corporations running big back-ends that use COBOL, why should "the community" bother much with that? I doubt it's anyone's itch to scratch. Customers want to run COBOL because the code has had decades of real-world production use, not because of COBOLs merits. If the same people still ran assembler code, I'd trust that too. Doesn't mean I'd like to give up on modern languages because of it. If I heard the words "legacy modernization", I'd think "don't break what works". Doesn't mean big new developments are made in COBOL, they interface it.
I'm almost convinced that COBOL will be running on systems a hundred years from now. Any Turing complete language could produce working code to solve anything (or well, as much as any other Turing complete one, anyway). Clearly there's some such code in COBOL, which it makes no sense to reimplement in another language just for the sake of reimplementing it. But I don't see the benefit of trying to revive COBOL development, there are now much better tools for the job. How long has it been since the term "Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language" was coined? It's dead, Jim. The only tools needed are those to ease its passing.
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mandelbr0t,
The point is why rewrite something that works fine already. These COBOL applications work well now, some do have significant documentation, and believe it or not some (not many) have been rewritten (or just developed) recently.
Before you think I am clueless ponder this.
COBOL has a proven track record of over 40 years. Over that time is has matured and became very stable. It is reliable and quick.
Some COBOL Applications handle massive amounts of data that many servers would choke on. (Admittedly this is mostly due to the hardware architecture.) I personally wrote a program that would process over 35GB daily in about 10minutes. How many servers can process that amount of information? How many languages would you trust to deal with that quantity of information? Think of how much even the smallest memory leak in a language would be compounded with the sheer volume of data that we are talking about.
The Y2K crisis happened because programmers wrote programs that far exceeded the length of time they were initially expected to be used. 20 years ago, programmers used only 2 bytes for the year because they a) did not expect the program to be around in 2000, and b) memory and storage space required a premium price. For the most part it wasn't because they were bad programmer, they tried to be efficient programmers and the program lasted far better than they ever thought it would. Now a neophyte thinks it is a requirement to rewrite any program just because it is old(over 3 years). If you code haphazardly and do not think about future maintenance you may be forced to rewrite old code, but if you code with foresight you make the underly structure easy to maintain and upgrade.
The Y2K crisis also did one other thing. It made people re-evaluate their current needs and see if they were being met. The people who stayed with COBOL did so consciously. They made the decison that COBOL was fulfilling their needs or the programs would have been ported then (time permitting of course)
And yes, there is even new development with COBOL. The program I mentioned above with the 35GB of data was brand new and written in 2002. It processes returned billing information to AT&T from the LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) daily.
Now, I know someone is going to say that I am a biased old fart, but I am in my 30's, and the specific program I mentioned was my last COBOL program I wrote before becoming a Web Developer. The group I was with is still working with COBOL, but I moved on because even though it works well, I find writing COBOL too easy and monotonous. But the reliability, stability, and 40+ years of applications developed for it are why COBOL is still around and why it will still be around for a long time to come.
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The company I work for (large fortune 500 company) still uses a lot of cobol on the mainframe for financial transactions. Why use an "ancient" language? Because there is 20-30 years of business knowledge encoded in the cobol code. Not only that, but it is tested, tried, and it just works perfectly. Rewriting in a modern language would make no sense other than using the "latest technology." Rewriting would most certainly introduce bugs which could potentially cost the company millions since it is running financial processes. Cobol was meant for the business and financial world and is well suited for it.
I got nothin'
You may be in touch with modern software principles but sadly you are out of touch with business principles. Ideology does not make a company money. And a company is about making money not writing code conforming to modern code design.
To make a business case for code change, you need to back up your reasoning by showing how it will either 1) save the company money within 5 years or less (including paying off all the money spent for the code upgrade which at large companies could run into hundreds of millions of dollars) or 2) earn more money for the company (including paying for the code changes) within 5 years or less. You could argue that these are the same things but I look at them differently as one causes earnings to increase indirectly through savings, and the other directly though increased revenue.
If you can't do either, then forget it. If you don't understand why, think about where your paycheque comes from and how the company is going to be able to afford to pay you to work on no-gain projects. If you don't want to understand why, then stay a coder... not even an analyst, stay a coder. You must justify the costs of these kinds of expenditures. Now it is possible and even likely that someone was able to justify the costs of fixing design issues on projects you worked on. However, in corporate life, wholesale 'fixing' of 30 or 40 year old stable code is not usually justifiable for design sake alone.
For example on on projects I have worked on where large companies have modernized their systems (often replacing Cobol code) it always involved monetary reasons. Many times Cobol systems are built on other Cobol systems, which are built on other Cobol systems... Business domains begin crossing back and forth across system boundaries and things (for example customer service) become a nightmare. Take a customer order management process: Customer wants three things, it might take three systems to order it, two different customer service reps, and if something goes wrong, support has to track things across 3 systems. If you want to create a new product package it takes too much time to coordinate between systems and one or more might need programming changes which might mean data conversions if the interfaces change between the systems, etc. If the pain threshold gets to high by holding back the company in effectively competing because their systems piss the users off, piss the customers off, and hold back introduction of competitive products (in other words, if it is costing them more money keeping the old system than replacing it will cost), then they will consider replacing the old systems.
Since we are talking Cobol and financial transactions, we are talking *mostly* about the corporate world. When you are talking about large corporations, the cost to replace even an ordering and billing system can run well into the hundred million dollar range or more. Tens of millions is not uncommon either. Projects in the million dollar range are a dime a dozen in the corporate world.
Note: I don't particularly like Cobol... actually I don't like it period (I like C/C++/Java syntax better because I understadn it :-). But for me to justify something to a customer, it must solve a customers problem. The first thing to remember is their main problem is how to make more money. Period. It is not about supporting good code design. They could have something in place that was the worst coding job in the history of the planet, but if it makes them money it won't matter. Unless of course you can show them in concrete terms that a good design will pay for itself by directly or indirectly making them more money.
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