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Department of Homeland Security Still Uses COBOL (softpedia.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Common-Business-Oriented-Languages dept.

The Department of Defense has promised to finally stop managing the U.S. nuclear arsenal with floppy disks "by the end of 2017". But an anonymous reader shares Softpedia's report about another startling revelation this week from the Government Accountability Office: Another agency that plans to upgrade is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which uses COBOL, a programming language from the '50s to manage a system for employee time and attendance. Unfortunately for the VA, there were funds only to upgrade that COBOL system, because the agency still uses the antiquated programming language to run another system that tracks claims filed by veterans for benefits, eligibility, and dates of death. This latter system won't be updated this year. Another serious COBOL user is the Department of Homeland Security, who employs it to track hiring operations, alongside a 2008 IBM z10 mainframe and a Web component that uses a Windows 2012 server running Java.
Personnel files are serious business. A 2015 leak of the secret service's confidential personnel files for a Utah Congressman (who was leading a probe into high-profile security breaches and other missteps) led the Department of Homeland Security to discipline 41 secret service agents.

4 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's wrong with using COBOL? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is not a thing wrong with it. It is a lot easier to maintain for record-keeping tasks than some other languages which are in vogue. And Z mainframes are really reliable. My employer had one for years and the only time it went down was for scheduled OS maintenance.

  2. it's not what you say, it's how you say it. by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Informative

    IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
    PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.

    *
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    CONFIGURATION SECTION.
    SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
    OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.

    DATA DIVISION.
    FILE SECTION.

    PROCEDURE DIVISION.

    MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
    BEGIN.
              DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
              DISPLAY "What's wrong with COBOL?".
              DISPLAY "Frosty piss!!!!!! ".
    STOP RUN.
    MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
    EXIT.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Staggering by DaMattster · · Score: 1, Informative

    The incompetence of the federal government is absolutely staggering! It's time to get rid of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security is the asshole of the executive branch of government.

  4. Migrations are costly and newer is not better by cowtamer · · Score: 4, Informative

    For the record -- IANACP -- I've never written or compiled a line of COBOL in my life..

    But I did help migrate an old mainframe based system to a new "client-server based three tier architecture system based on Linux and a Java thin client" back in the very early 00's. The old system was near perfect and did the job, even though it ran on the (then alien to me) mainframe.

    The new system was written by 20-somethings like myself and would (even with WAY more computational resources) conk out at the worst times. This, I believe, is the story of EVERY migration. It's not necessarily that older is better, or "they don't make them like they used to", but that software development is a bug-prone and arduous process that you will not get right the first time.

    So if you're the VA administrator with an established career, you might be forgiven for not taking the risk of jeopardizing employee and patient data and services to satisfy some vague desire for "modernization", especially if you know that the project will be full of errors and WAY over budget.

    What's the solution? I don't know. Start teaching COBOL and commission Google to create "Google Mainframe Migration"???