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Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On COBOL, Now Scrambling To Find IT 'Cowboys' To Keep Things Afloat (reuters.com)
From a report on Reuters: Bill Hinshaw is not a typical 75-year-old. He divides his time between his family -- he has 32 grandchildren and great-grandchildren -- and helping U.S. companies avert crippling computer meltdowns. Hinshaw, who got into programming in the 1960s when computers took up entire rooms and programmers used punch cards, is a member of a dwindling community of IT veterans who specialize in a vintage programming language called COBOL. The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed nearly 60 years ago and has been gradually replaced by newer, more versatile languages such as Java, C and Python. Although few universities still offer COBOL courses, the language remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world. In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations and parts of the federal government still largely rely on it because it underpins powerful systems that were built in the 70s or 80s and never fully replaced. And here lies the problem: if something goes wrong, few people know how to fix it. The stakes are especially high for the financial industry, where an estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems. The language underpins deposit accounts, check-clearing services, card networks, ATMs, mortgage servicing, loan ledgers and other services. The industry's aggressive push into digital banking makes it even more important to solve the COBOL dilemma. Mobile apps and other new tools are written in modern languages that need to work seamlessly with old underlying systems. That is where Hinshaw and fellow COBOL specialists come in. A few years ago, the north Texas resident planned to shutter his IT firm and retire after decades of working with financial and public institutions, but calls from former clients just kept coming.
Any good programmer can learn to program in COBOL given enough financial incentives.
Java, C, and Python are newer and more versatile than COBOL. I fail to see your point. Yeah, some are old, but COBOL is the oldest, so the sentence is still correct.
$250/hr is an "outrageous rate" to charge a bank? What are you, 14??
Ever since I first joined /. there has been an article a year stating:
- Major organizations, banks, governments, etc. are still relying on COBOL.
- COBOL programmers are in great demand so dust off your old MVS skills (and maybe pull out those JCL manuals) and offer up your services, you're in demand!
What I really think is the big takeaway from all this is simply that the need for supporting for your old software is never going away - so think of a way of monetizing it.
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Except the linked article specifically notes that the 75 year old's company is a group of 20 or so "code cowboys" who parachute in to fix systems they have no prior knowledge of and get paid $100/hr for the pleasure. So it would seem deep understanding of the language and the ability to troubleshoot bad code in said language is indeed the crux of the issue.
COBOL is the Caterpillar D11 of data processing.
When you need to process millions of records reliably and constantly, a correctly constructed COBOL solution is robust, maintainable, and reliable.
COBOL doesn't and shouldn't give a shit about drop downs, java, PDFs and all that other bullshit. It's is doing the heavy lifting that C, Java (don't make me puke), and all these other supposedly superior languages can't do.
Eye Candy has nothing to do with making sure 50,000 employees get their checks every week or millions of SS recipients get their checks every month.
And the best thing, it's not rocket science...by design. A single semester of COBOL can get someone up to speed to the point where they can maintain everyday COBOL applications. When things get crazy, it's not the language that's the roadblock, it's just the normal analytical skills.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
'Eventually COBOL will need to interface with new code...' Eventually? Do you suppose these programs had support for EFT, ATMs, bank-by-phone, online banking, mobile apps, etc when they were written 50+ years ago? You're not going to scare them with 'Oooh - there could be a new requirement!'
When you say rewriting is a good strategy, do you have ANY idea what that entails? You are not just talking about a few COBOL modules here and there. You are talking about potentially changing the ENTIRE system. Your COBOL program is probably running under CICS. The hardware CICS and your program have been running on have been optimized for your workload. Your data is probably stored on ECKD DASDs. Your data is probably stored in packed decimal format, so it can be operated on with a single, optimized, machine instruction.
Now, you want to 'rewrite' it. OK, where do you start? If you just replace your one COBOL module with some other language, does your 'new' language natively support the data you are operating on? Does it support the types of datasets you are using? Does it do those things with the same performance characteristics as COBOL? Does it properly and efficiently interface with CICS?
Your last paragraph is laughable. These 'old' systems are 'chewing-gum-and-tinfoil' unreliable systems? Oh yeah? When have you heard of one of these systems failing? When have you heard of security breeches involving these systems? And before you incorrectly say 'airlines', I will point out that NONE of the recent airline outages involved the mainframe portion of the operation. It was the 'new, better' stuff that falied in every case.
Yeah. "All You Have To Do Is..."
Think about human languages. Translate "Out of Sight, out of Mind to a language like Chinese, where a literal conversion might be "no-see, no-think". Now take another automated translator and translate it back: Invisible Idiot.
Every language - computer or human - has its unique characteristics. There's an old saying, in fact that "Translators are traitors".
Case in point: COBOL didn't support variable-length strings. Most modern languages have little or no tolerance for fixed-length strings. IBM COBOL supported a hardware-level data type (COMPUTATIONAL-3) which can store penny fractions precisely. Most modern languages don't allow for that, and tend to use floating-point (COBOL COMPUTATIONAL-2). Which cannot store decimal values precisely. Fuzz the pennies on people's paychecks and see how long before the torches and pitchforks come out. It's one of 2 reasons why so many payroll and accounting systems are written in COBOL (with the other one being that there's not exactly a lot of leading-edge technology in basic financial systems).
Some of these things can be automatically dealt with - albeit with some inefficiency - some of the more subtle issues have to be dealt with more directly, just as we've never yet managed to construct truly generic software-writing systems and have to continue to use programmers instead of robots like we do with truck driving and day-trading.
I have, actually worked with/supported automated code translation projects using commercial translator products. Every one of them has required a time and manpower budget for the clean-up crew. You can get about 80% of the job done automatically (although the resulting code may look horrible to a native human programmer). But to get something actually working, the tools need human help.