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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?'"
Before I start, I know all too well that you can write good or terrible code in any language. Still, most COBOL code I've seen is written to run well on hardware that is no longer relevant. A recent experience with an ex-coworker illustrated this pretty well for me:
Said fellow, call him "Joe", had about 30 years of COBOL experience. We're a Python shop but hired him based on his general coding abilities. The problem was that he wrote COBOL in every language he used, and the results were disastrous. He was used to optimizing for tiny RAM machines or tight resource allocations and did things like querying the database with a rather complex join for each record out of quite a few million. I stepped in to look at his code because it took about 4 hours to run and was slamming the database most of the time. I re-wrote part of it with a bit of caching and got the run-time down to 8 seconds. (Choose to believe me or not, but I'd testify to those numbers in court.) I gave it back to him, he made some modifications, and tried it again - 3 hours this time. I asked him what on Earth he'd done to re-break the program, and he'd pretty much stripped out my caching. Why? Because it used almost half a gig of RAM! on his desktop and he thought that was abhorrent.
Never mind that it was going to be run on a server with 8GB of RAM, and that I'd much rather use .5GB for 8 seconds than 1MB for 3 hours of intense activity.
So Joe isn't every COBOL programmer, but you and I both know that he's a lot of them. But back to the direct point, how much of that 250GLOC was written with the assumption that it'd be running on 512KB machines or with glacial hard drives or where making the executable as tiny as possible was an extreme priority? Doing things like storing cache data in hash tables would've been obscenely expensive back in the day, so those old algorithms were designed to be hyper-efficient and dog slow. Whether you think that constitutes "working well" is up to you.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
> I declined to take the elective COBOL classes.
> I knew enough about COBOL then to know that I
> could not drag myself out of bed in the morning
> to make a living with it.
COBOL also encourages "heroic" programming. At a shop I worked at, they were very disparaging of the new systems using relational databases, and proud of the mainframe COBOL stuff, because it never went down.
If you don't count the 4 times in one year a hardware failure caused critical business systems to go offline for 2 days to 3 weeks at a time while teams of COBOL coders used tools to manually delete and rebuild tables and indexes when various failures caused -extensive data corruption-.
And the corrupt data caused by operator errors in nightly batch processing.
And the recoding to fix a major financials bug that went undetected for 10 years until we compared the numbers on the external PC system.
You see, that was "normal operations." by contrast, when a network failure occurred and the relational systems we built went offline for 45 minutes, and data recovery was "re-run the job", -that- was a disaster caused by the "sloppy PC programmers and their tinkertoy PC systems."
COBOL's great stuff...if you like being paged at all hours to manually fix data.