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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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From what I've seen, the issue in finding developers for these codebases isn't in the language knowledge (i.e. COBOL), it's in the knowledge of the poorly-documented legacy software. Sure, you can get a developer to learn COBOL fairly easily, but when the software is full of dead ends, spaghetti code, and unknown business logic and workflow logic, their knowledge of COBOL won't help. Instead you need to hire someone who knows the system, and was probably complicit in creating this mess, to do anything. Either that or bite the bullet and start a huge replacement project that costs several magnitudes more than exorbitant hourly rates.
A sentence can be technically correct yet still reveal the writer to be an idiot... sometimes in subtle fashion that other idiots wouldn't necessarily pick up on...
COBOL has been around long enough to be a victim of featuritus. I has a lot of built-in operations and short-cuts that are great if you know them, but could trip up a newbie.
But the hard part of a typical COBOL job is probably learning your way around many thousands of lines of existing programs. I've always found writing code simpler than reading code written by somebody else, especially if it's poorly structured, documented, commented, etc.
The language and syntax the business logic is written in is secondary to that issue. Readable code can be written in any language, but so can crazy pasta.
Table-ized A.I.
Is there any programming language with "Visual" in the title that's worthwhile?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
One of the nice things about f77 and i presume cobol is that memory is allocated in a fixed way at compile time. so no mallocs and no deallocs and thus no null pointers. string buffer sizes are known. and relatively speaking, its harder to find cases where typos are not also syntax errors. for exapmle typing = instead of ==.
now for many things this memory issue is the pits which is why we like those other laguages. it makes object oriented styles impossible though for a fixed maximum number of objects you can fake it. but for a lot of things its all you need. and the block memory structures of multi dimensional arrays make data contiguous in memory and enable very efficient parallel optimizations. so there are advantages to giving up features.
if you are wanting very reliable code its not a crazy choice,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I supported several apps based on Microfocus COBOL and so-called Visual COBOL. No significant problems with either platform, the apps worked as well as thne programmers did, or more correctly, bugs happened. One was rock solid, the other had predictable issues with every major release that were resolved without much delay.
Stereotyping COBOL is inevitably just age discrimination. It's functional, as the history and current situation proves. It's a language, competent programmers that have progress from C to C++ to Java will figure it out if they see profit in doing so. I work with an old-school COBOL programmer who has no patience with the young whippersnappers who whine about every problem a legacy platform presents. There is so little interest around here to abandon the core transaction systems that claims that COBOL is 'obsolete' fall on deaf ears. They train new maintainers here. What a concept, training your team! Gah!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I mean, everyone knows that Ethernet uses the second and third pairs on an 8P8C jack, while Token Ring uses the first and second pairs. If they wanted to get it right they needed to just connect pairs 1 to 2, and 2 to 3, or if crossover, pairs 1 to 3, and 2 to 2...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The COBOL programmers at my place are actually using it to develop new functionality that's keeping up with the financial world and actually pushing the leading edge. They've done nightly program releases since literally decades before the term "agile" was a thing. The notion that COBOL is just a legacy hold on that is in maintenance mode everywhere is also somewhat of a misconception. That's probably the case in some locations where it's providing a core business function and the rest of the infrastructure has evolved around it to patch the functions that support whatever the modern requirements are but there are plenty of people using it to create new function as well.
Why don't they automatically translate them to something more modern then run them in the cloud?
Maintaining these systems is just throwing good money away. Money that we all end up paying via our bank charges.
Translate debugged, working, proven code into something else? Not really a good strategy for production code. I also doubt that maintaining those systems is a problem or limiting expense. Modern hardware can run COBOL just fine. As TFS implies, the expense is in finding and hiring people trained in (or willing to learn) a language many don't see as useful and/or sexy -- mainly 'cause it's old. Newer / younger isn't always better or less expensive
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Correct. I've been a COBOL gun for hire for 15 years, mostly in finance, and the rubbish you have to get your head around sometimes is amazing. On the flip side I've seen some very clever things too.
Once I had to fix a nasty bug in a clearing system causing dropped transactions; took me a day of scrutinising thousands of lines to find the logic error.
Largely it is actually all being phased out though, contrary to this article. There were times I could have $3000/hr contracts, they're much less frequent these days.
Haha! IBM is making a 'killing supporting old systems'? IBM comes out with NEW mainframes about every two years. The current system (z13) is from all the way back in 2015. And you won't find 'better hardware' anywhere. Cheaper? Certainly. Better? No.
I hope all these COBOL programmers are smart enough to charge outrageous rates. Minimum $250/hr. They've got the banks over a barrel, any time the situation is reversed the banks don't hesitate to screw us.
$250 per hour is a pretty normal rate for an experienced professional, hardly outrageous at all. When I worked for IBM Global Services, they billed me out at $300 per hour. Granted that IBM commands a premium due to their marketing channels, but I'm sure I could have gotten $200 per hour on my own and my expertise is far from as rare as deep COBOL experience. I'd expect people like the one mentioned in the article to cost more like $500 per hour, if they're actually aware of their own worth, and I wouldn't consider even that outrageous.
If I were in the position of those programmers, I would probably try to avoid quoting an hourly rate at all. Instead I'd do it all as piece-rate work, based on detailed specifications -- especially if I'm working on a system that I know, so I have a good idea of what sorts of obstacles I might run into. Then I'd try to set my price based on the value of the work to the business, rather than on the time it would take me to produce it. That could easily result in contracts that work out to many thousands of dollars per hour.
A friend who is a lawyer told me that the best piece of career advice he ever got from his father, also a lawyer, is "Take the money, son." He didn't mean to take money for unethical work, but just that one shouldn't balk at accepting high fees just because they seem too high. If the customer is willing to pay, take the money. That attitude should absolutely be applied to doing contract work for banks.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I started programming in COBOL in 1978. I spent a decade or so on IBM mainframes with COBOL and 370 assembler.
I never referred to anything as a COBOL file. There were many types of file and database structures on IBM mainframes. While many simple systems used fixed record formats it wasn't nearly always the case.
The FILE section of a COBOL program allowed for varying record sizes:
FD file-name
RECORD IS VARYING IN SIZE FROM small-size TO large-size DEPENDING ON size-variable.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
77 size-variable PIC 9(5).
The language also allows for the redefinition of record layouts so the type of data and what is to be done with it can be determined at run-time.
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.
It never occurred to them because they're not anywhere near as smart as you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."