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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. What's wrong with using COBOL? by tolydude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's all I have to say.

    1. Re: What's wrong with using COBOL? by Lorens · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who cares about webscale, we're talking big-data-scale. COBOL is not the problem. COBOL, DB2 for transactions, CICS to connect from web-land, nightly dump changes to Hadoop to run queries faster and cheaper. Been there, done that, saved millions (in USD). But nobody is even thinking of converting the 40000-and-some COBOL programs off the mainframe, not cost-effective at all.

  2. So what? by kenh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Your bank, your insurance company, and any large corporation likely has COBOL programs running in their environment.

    What it the issue with using COBOL? Is it the age of the language or the fact that all your professors in college choose not to teach it?

    Using a proven tool to solve a problem is called being practical.

    --
    Ken
  3. So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who cares that they use COBOL? It's still a maintained language. The most recent standard is from 2014, just like C++. There are compilers for the language targeting virtually every platform that exists, including the JVM and .NET CLR, still under active development and support. The language supports object-oriented programming, although admittedly the verbosity certainly skyrockets there. Many of the largest financial institutions in the US rely on COBOL. Many government standardized file formats are very obviously driven by the nature of COBOL's structured I/O.

    The bigger question is whether or not these organizations still retain staff that are capable of maintaining these programs. It doesn't matter if the code was originally written 60 years ago or last year if nobody knows how it works or how to fix it.