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COBOL Will Outlive Us All
jfruh writes "Here's an old computer science joke: What's the difference between hardware and software? If you use hardware long enough, it breaks. If you use software long enough, it works. The truth behind that is the reason that so much decades-old COBOL code is out there still driving crucial applications at banks and other huge companies. Many attempts to replace COBOL applications flopped in the 1980s and '90s, and we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — but the Baby Boomers who wrote all that code are now retiring en masse."
No, the language doesn't matter. It is the fact that the COBOL code is old. When it was popular it was common for organizations to write their own software. This custom written software was molded to fit the companies processes and workflow. Then you add decades of alterations and the software gets very complex, however it nearly covers the full operation.
So now if you are going to replace it, right now it is popular to get these "enterprise" solutions that are so generic that it takes more work to configure it than it does to make new software or port the code in a new language.
As well most organizations just don't know why they need to upgrade they just think they do, and after the upgrade they want a program to do exactly what the last one did.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Every 3 to 5 years this topic comes up. It's almost like some new batch of CompSci graduates start to evaluate the state of the industry, and share their "discoveries" with the world. Except it is the same old discoveries couched in modern terms.
Viewed through the eyes of a modern programmer, COBOL is indeed a joke. A horrible one. It violates nearly every single principle of good language design in what appears to be a misguided attempt to make programming "friendly." A CS undergrad would get a poor grade turning in something like COBOL as a Programming Languages 101 project.
But for a language first specified in 1959 (when computing didn't even have the Integrated Circuit yet), it's a work of staggering genius; they didn't HAVE all those rules of good language design to fall back on! At the time, FORTRAN had been out for all of two years and LISP for one; hardly enough time to have much experience with knowing what not to do, and neither of those languages targeted the same problem domain.
COBOL made modern computing accessible and useful to businesses. It's programs have maintained decent backwards compatibility for about half a century. And for all it's foibles, all those hundreds of millions of lines of COBOL actually work. They may be a disgusting kludge, a result of decades of compromises, but these gigantic black boxes of spaghetti Work. And there's no reason to think they'll stop doing so any time soon. Nor any reason to believe that replacing them would be in any way cost-effective.
That because the cost of retraining people in new workflows is generally higher than the software package to begin with.
If you gut and replace software you have to modify every employee's workflow to compensate. EVERY person has to do their job slightly differently, and no one has the answers as to how it all has to be worked out from the beginning for each part.
That takes months in a small 20 person organization that is flexible and adaptable. It can take years of lost productivity for larger ones.
I am doing it right now. We are gutting our old ERP system to use a much simplier but ultimately more useful ERP system. Everything from sales, accounting, purchasing, warehousing, inventory, delivery drivers, all have to change how they process their paperwork. We basically had the office staff doing 2 days of nothing as we sorted out bugs with the initial data transfer. Now that is done we begin the task of sorting out workflows, new SOPs, etc.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
It is a bromide perpetrated by ITAA and business groups that we can't find enough programmers to replace the ones who are retiring.
The simple truth is that no one wants to PAY what people are worth, and there is rampant age discrimination:
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/tennant/yes-age-discrimination-is-worse-in-it-than-in-other-fields/?cs=38549
Be willing to hire, retrain, or do whatever it takes to employ people over 35 and this so-called problem will be
shown to be the chimera that it really is.
... the following languages all support an accurate decimal data type in the standard libraries: Python, Ruby, Java, and Objective-C.
Which is not the same as supporting it in the language itself, either from a convenience nor a performance point of view.
That is all.