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COBOL Turning 50, Still Important
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from a story about COBOL's influence as it approaches 50 years in existence:
"According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, 'some 70% to 80% of UK plc business transactions are still based on COBOL.' ... Mike Gilpin, from the market research company Forrester, says that the company's most recent related survey found that 32% of enterprises say they still use COBOL for development or maintenance. ... A lot of this maintenance and development takes place on IBM products. The company's software group director of product delivery and strategy, Charles Chu, says that he doesn't think 'legacy' is pejorative. 'Business constantly evolves,' he adds, 'but there are 250bn lines of COBOL code working well worldwide. Why would companies replace systems that are working well?'"
Why would companies replace systems that are working well?
Because the director of IT or whatever his title is will want to be able to put on his resume that HE moved a company from a "Legacy" and "Outdated" system to a modern "web based solution" that enables "greater productivity" among the workforce saving "millions of dollars". Now, he can put that on his resume and go for the CTO, CIO, or whatever jobs.
I've seen it and it works.
Nice story, but it doesn't say anything about COBOL.
I have a similar story about 30 programmers who spent two years writing java code and delivering nothing useful because the requirement called for two different architectures: one best served with a batch system, the other best served with a real-time system. What they need is COBOL and C, but what they know is java and struts. It's been another four years since I ran screaming from the building and they still haven't delivered anything useful.
Inept programmers will screw things up in any language.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
COBOL is a perfect example of an "adequate" language, like most programming languages that are in common use. Adequate languages linger forever if there is a tool chain to support them because there is little in the way of economic rationale for replacing them.
The reason adequate languages proliferate over the long term is that only inadequate languages get replaced, and "ideal" languages become hopelessly politicized by purists and ideologues, leaving the adequate, practical, boring languages as the sound business choice. It is a real-world example of perfect being the enemy of good enough, but for economic reasons good enough always wins.
As just one data point, a certain place replaced a COBOL app that ran with millisecond response time just fine on a 2 megabyte 1 MIPS mainframe, replaced it with a spankin' fresh Java app that ran about 2000 times slower on an 8 gig 16-CPU, 800MHz very expensive water-cooled mainframe.
Now it could have been due to having a bunch of neophyte Java weenies doing the coding, but I'm just sayin', when there's three orders of speed and 3.5 orders of RAM, there may be something significant in the implementation language.
You see that kind of thing from lots of programmers who only know one language well. This is why a good programmer always keeps up with modern architectures. I've seen C programmers who put things in globals rather than passing them on the stack, because that was faster before caching (now it breaks locality of reference, and moves something that was in a register or on the stack to an indirect reference where it needs extra loads and causes extra cache churn).
I've seen programmers who grew up with Pascal carefully turning multiplies into sequences of adds and shifts. Great, except that something like the Athlon can do two multiplies in parallel, but only one shift at a time (because most code contains a lot more multiplies than shifts), stalling the pipeline.
Another common issue is aggressively testing for potential special cases for optimising, ignoring the fact that branches are very expensive on most modern CPUs and the cost of the checks is now often greater than the saving from shortcutting the special cases.
Java programmers are not immune to this, and often optimise based on old versions of the JVM. One favourite is to add finally everywhere, making the code very rigid, believing this makes it faster. In a modern JVM, finally is completely ignored; the VM already knows if a class is not subclassed and will do the same optimisations whether it is declared finally or not.
There's a reason why the rules for optimisation are:
If you write good algorithms, your compiler will usually produce reasonable code. If this isn't fast enough, then make sure you really understand how your VM and target CPU work, before you try optimising. The experts only part isn't a joke.
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Why is no one updating Cobol code? Because the skill to interact with other systems is disappearing.
As a Mainframe Utilities Programmer I hear it from customers all the time. "We can't touch that system because the guy who wrote it retired." System here just represent the code, but also the server backend stuff like database design.
I have heard stories of an IT department being 10 man team. In the 80s that team had everyone dedicated in maintaining the mainframes. Now, they still have 10 people but only 1 person is there to work on the Mainframe.
So now you have code from the 70s that no one understands, running a mission critical application, and you think the IT manager is going to touch it? He is praying it doesnt break on his watch or he might get a call from the COO. Even if it breaks, it is better to patch it then rewrite it because the database behind it is so vital to all the rest of the application that it cant be changed either.
The issue mainly is that no one is teaching old skills anymore. Skills that are still required, but really arent 'sexy' for young college students to learn. Even the name "Mainframe" has grandfather connotation to it while if people actually looked at the IBM Z Servers, one would see how high tech these systems actually are.
When you have working code in COBOL, really battle-hardened proven-beyond-doubt COBOL code, would you really trust a mechanical translation into another language?
I wouldn't, no way! And there is no way to completely test the new code either, as the specs never existed or at least are missing and/or outdated.
I'd rather keep the working COBOL code. Even if that means I have to deal with grumpy old geezers to maintain said code.
How does this add up?
1. Around a third of UK companies say they have even at least one COBOL program somewhere in their enterprise.
2. Around three quarters of all UK electronic business is coded in COBOL.
I'm aware that there are allegedly pockets of COBOL here and there with some fairly significant nuclei of usage within certain business sectors but seriously... 80% of all electronic transactions?
Monster.co.uk search for single keyword in title, 11th Apr 2009:
Java: 173 hits
C++: 142 hits
PHP: 95 hits
Perl: 39 hits
COBOL: 1 hit
This doesn't seem to suggest a great demand for COBOL coders at present which - one would think - suggests little use of COBOL.
I've heard this "the world secretly runs on COBOL" story countless times over my career, but seldom seen more than a few lines of COBOL actually deployed in businesses I've worked with. Is the whole thing just a weird industry myth?
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Its not just the mythical "mission critical" aspect that keeps businesses dependent on COBOL. MANY of those programs required either financial analysts to "vet" the COBOL program, or lawyers to "vet" the COBOL program complied with laws (privacy, methods of determinations, etc.).
Not just are you putting in the cost to refactor the program from scratch, not just are you risking a bug costing your company hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, but you also have to take in the costs of expensive NON-programmers to "bless" the new program.
Then also realize that the new whizbang technologies like SQL and java will RUN LIKE A DOG compared to the COBOL program. That's because mainframes are optimized data I/O machines. They're not great for making intense calculations or retrieving indexed relationships, but they are a BEAST when it comes to pulling out gigabytes of user data, and then making simple calculations and updates to each. It also sounds like top notch COBOL programmers programmed to the machine for efficiency. That's not really done anymore by generic programmers.
New shops don't have to consider COBOL. But any large company (and gov't) could potentially take a huge hit on their finances (in legal issues) if refactor project has a bug. You can roll the dice, or you can just pay another couple million/year and hope nothing ever forces you to consider replacing your legacy COBOL programs that no one knows how they work, or how to change them.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I've had an interesting run through IT environments so far. Each one of my employers has successfully used what would be called a "legacy system" to do core business transactions. I'm not old by any means, but I definitely see no reason to get rid of systems that are performing well.
The qualification for that statement, of course, is "performing well." The side effect to using older systems is all the bolt-ons you have to use to get newer functionality working. My current employer uses a midrange system from the early 80s to run the core of the operation, and it has tons of extra software and hardware riding on top of it to do modern things like access without terminal emulators and message queuing. The time to consider a replacement is when these systems become too unwieldy or brittle to manage. For example, if a transaction-processing system needs a daily FTP feed from some source, and it doesn't get it, will that blow up the whole system? If the answer is yes, it's time to fix the problem or replace the underlying system if it's bad enough.
I'm very skeptical of anyone who comes in and says, barely looking at the existing system, that it needs to be ripped and replaced. A lot of it stems from the fact that IT hasn't matured all the way yet. People still come into the field knowing little more than the Java they were taught in school, and don't have the big-picture attitude you need to really understand IT. You may think I'm an old fart, but I'm really not. I've learned the basic rule of IT -- you're not there to play with computers and have fun. You're there to make sure the business you support is able to do their work, preferably without calling you in every night to fix something.
I think you mean final here, no? finally does something else.
Very true.
I'd also add the additional rule: You don't know it's slow until you've benchmarked it. All too often I have seen, and I should add that I've perpetrated this myself, people spend ages painstakingly optimising parts of a system that felt like they were cause speed problems, when actually they weren't.
I once spent about two or three months designing and implementing a clever caching system for properties in a UI framework. It was subtle and complex, and I was very proud of it, and it was a total waste of time. We eventually threw it all away and stored the properties in an AVL tree. Yes, this involved looking up the properties in the inner loops of all the UI component redraw methods, but compared to the amount of work of touching every pixel on the screen, this was trivial. And it increased flexibility, reduced complexity and code size, and vastly improved maintainability.
In a lot of environments in-house web apps would only serve the purpose of being trendy. I suspect a company who is smart enough to keep their working code around would probably resist the temptation of unnecessary "webizing" their internal apps.
This revived some slightly old memories.
I remember a talk by the local FORTRAN compiler guru in the mid-70s.
After talking about some intricacies of the IBM FORTRAN H compiler, he gave some examples of the compiler's abilities. Summarizing it with: Don't try too hard to optimize. Leave it to the compiler. It usually knows what it is doing.
And that sums it up rather nicely.
I'd rather work on code written by someone else who concentrated on writing readable code than on code written by someone trying to be clever.
(Note to people born after around 1980: Yes, we too believed it would be cool to write cool, complex code, with the odd assembler routine thrown in for good measure (which, btw. didn't really save much time), badly documented and demonstrating our superiour coding abilities. Looking back, we were idiots who should have been fired. Don't repeat our mistakes, OK?)
There's a reason why the rules for optimisation are:
1. Don't.
2. Don't yet (experts only).
If you write good algorithms, your compiler will usually produce reasonable code. If this isn't fast enough, then make sure you really understand how your VM and target CPU work, before you try optimising. The experts only part isn't a joke.
Except that there's a clear and definite time to optimise - when performance is in the crapper!
Just 2 days ago, I heard complaints about a well-written (but very old!) report that was still taking as long as 5 minutes to run when accessing a large data set. Taking a look, I found that it was using an old template system for output using regex, and for a complex report, the regex was killing the server. So I replaced it with a different template engine using simple string replacement, and reduced > 5 minutes reporting time to about 15 seconds. Further looking there found a simple 3-element index in the database cut the time down to 2 seconds.
Now the report comes up INSTANTLY in most cases.
Optimising is necessary - but only AFTER the fact!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.