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COBOL Will Outlive Us All

Posted by Soulskill on from the lords-of-cobol-hear-our-prayers dept.

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."

2 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. If a technology is outdated, outsource it. by ixarux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yup. I was hired into one of those mainframe companies that worked with COBOL and JCL. The work was the most menial of works I had ever done(after they trained me for 6 months in it).
    The financial sector, the lumbering dinosaur that accepts change only when they have no other option, and the ones maintaining decades-old mainframes really have no incentive to change technologies at the moment. It's easier to just outsource the maintenance and servicing of the mainframes. There are enough of coders (like in the company I joined) in developing countries across the world who would gladly take it up.
    From my experience, there is little development happening any more. I think the day when they run out of people who want to this crappy menial job (which is never) is the day COBOL will go extinct.

    1. Re:If a technology is outdated, outsource it. by jandersen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So, you didn't like to work on a mainframe, then?

      But don't slag off the mainframe just because it is 'old' technology - the PC architecture isn't all that young either, and the mainframe, believe it or not, is in fact very VERY much on the technological forefront, hardware wise. Mainframes had fiber attached disks before most modern developers had heard of networking.

      Big to huge institutions don't use mainframes because they are too backwards thinking, but because of reliability. In an industry where downtime costs millions to tens of millions per minute, that counts a lot. On a mainfram you can hot-swap just about everything - not just disks, but everything. And if you wish, you can run Linux on it as well; but it is amazing how often the choice is MVS and COBOL; that is because they are just what you need - not multitools like UNIX and C, just a plain old knife meant for cutting only.