Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You. (wsj.com)

Despite its advanced age, Cobol is still the most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide. Software programmed in Cobol powers millions of banking transactions every day and underpins critical computer mainframes. WSJ: And Cobol isn't going away anytime soon. Banks and other companies have come to the uncomfortable realization that ripping out old mainframes is pricey and complicated. Transitioning to new systems is likely to take years, and besides, a lot of the older tech works just fine. The problem is that Cobol isn't popular with new programmers. So, with a generation of Cobol specialists retiring, there is a continuing hunt to find a new generation of programmers to service this technology. In Texas, Mr. Hinshaw's (an anecdote in the story) company, the Cobol Cowboys, a group of mostly older programmers, is training U.S. military veterans in the programming language. Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks. In Malaysia, one consultancy that provides engineers versed in Cobol for its clients, iTAc MSC Outsourcing, has adopted the slogan "Keeping the Dinosaurs Alive." A host of companies offer online courses in Cobol in places like South Africa, India and Bangladesh. Developing economies are key technology-outsourcing centers for banks. Further reading: Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On COBOL, Now Scrambling To Find IT 'Cowboys' To Keep Things Afloat.

Comments

Re:Most prevalent? No.

[shadowknot]

It really isn't a stupid anecdote. Go to SHARE or GSE in Europe, you'll see representatives from the largest financial, retail and governmental industries who represent the bulk of transactional computing in the world. Practically every debit/credit/charge card swipe goes through a COBOL program, and these aren't "legacy" systems that are simply being maintained but systems in active development. I know personally of programs that have been written to facilitate new features like various NFC payment technologies recently. I will grant you that it's a largely invisible sector of the IT industry, if I wasn't in it I would probably still be ignorant to it too.

COBOL Has Advantages

[sycodon]

You can be a snobby all you want about your C and SQL databases, but one thing two combinations will never do is what COBOL does every night, weekly, etc.

That is process millions...I mean MILLIONS of records in a single night, producing bills, checks, statements, etc.

COBOL is optimized for record processing, not pretty pictures, drop down menus, HTML, etc.

COBOL has once focus:

1. Get the data in
2. Transform it
3. Get the data back out.

COBOL can slice and dice data in ways C and SQL can't even dream of.

You don't write Websites in COBOL. You do the serious work that involves billions of dollars of transactions. Reliably, repeatedly.

Re: Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

cobol may not be hard, but the IBM mainframe environment/ecosystem those cobol apps run in is not trivial.

Re:Seriously?

[DarkOx]

No even that is not 'hard' tedious often but not hard. People thought it was going to be hard, until they actually tried around y2k and it turned out to be not hard just a lot of work.

The hard part if there is a hard part is supporting the stack around it. What people, especially people on Slashdot who wrote some Microfocus COBOL in Windows for a college course some time, about COBOL is it does not run in vacuum. Its not the COBOL program that is hard. Its the fact that COPYBOOK is referenced in 65 different programs. Its the 500 JCL job steps before and after with their sync sorts and COND statements. Its the FTP and character conversion steps; and stuff that is scarping CICS and CICS web interfaces around the COBOL you need to worry over.

All this stuff amounts to Rube Goldburg devices that happened to be constructed from very very reliable and consistently operating components. So it all works and humms along for decades but try and replace any part of it with something new and feel the pain of running a square peg into a round hole.