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Why COBOL Could Come Back
snydeq writes "Sure 'legacy systems archaeologist' ranks as one of the 7 dirtiest jobs in IT, but COBOL skills might see a scant revival in the wake of California's high-profile pay-cut debacle. After all, as Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister points out, new code may in fact be more expensive than old code. According to an IDC survey, code complexity is on the rise. And it's not the applications that are growing more complex, but the technologies themselves. 'Multicore processing, SOA, and Web 2.0 all contribute to rising software development costs,' which include $5 million to $22 million spent on fixing defects per company per year. Do the math, and California's proposed $177 million nine-year modernization project cost will double, McAllister writes. Perhaps numbers like those won't deter modernization efforts, but the estimated 90,000 coders still versed in COBOL may find themselves in high demand teaching new dogs old tricks."
Yea, but a modern program could be supported and extended to provide that functionality. The COBOL? Not so much.
I can think of a few ways to do it really; most payroll apps have methods for pulling money out of paychecks (alimony, child support, Social Security). Likewise they have methods for providing payouts; trip reimbursements, whatever. Hack those up, and you're fine. Throw a liablity on the employee's salary for every minimum-wage payout, and once you start paying again, the liabilities are applied, and the checks are altered accordingly.
But doing that in a COBOL based billing system? Are you insane? I get the shakes when I have to maintain one of those, you have to test it over and over, and back everything up before you can even think about running it for the first time. No easy rollbacks, no obvious way to see what the hell it changed...It's a fricking nightmare.
Modern systems are easier to maintain and extend. The COBOL may have been quite the thing in 1983, but the world has moved on.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm not a filthy American. You trying to pick a fight or something?
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