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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
We reached out to Daniel Döderlein, CEO of Auka, who has experience with working with banks on technological solutions such as mobile payments. According to him, COBOL-based systems still function properly but they're faced with a more human problem.
This extremely critical part of the economic infrastructure of the planet is run on a very old piece of technology — which in itself is fine — if it weren't for the fact that the people servicing that technology are a dying race.
And Döderlein literally means dying. Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language.
And here I thought everyone knew banking software should be written in PHP, javascript, or a combination of the two.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:47PM (1 child)
Companies will complain that schools aren't giving students the correct education, and they should offer classes on COBOL.
But come on, this is COBOL. It has the reputation of being an easy language, good for those who find BASIC too hard. Good programmers find it tiresomely redundant and verbose. The real difficulty isn't COBOL, it may be knowledge of the ancient computing environments of the 1960s. Maybe they still use punch cards, tapes, and actual IBM mainframes from that era, though I'd guess they emulate all they can. Even if it's all emulated, probably someone still needs to know arcane stuff like Job Control Language.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:22PM
Again, learning JCL does not require deep intellectual resources from a generally skilled programmer. Been there, done that, meh.
This problem is entirely self-inflicted on the part of the banks, and every entity that thinks college degrees constitute a sane pre-filter for employment on these kind of isolated technical issues, which by definition are extremely vertical and require only someone with those vertical skills. Not to mention requiring documented work experience for gratuitously simple skillsets. "What, you've never been employed as a pencil sharpener? I'm sorry, you don't qualify for our office work." Yes, I am comparing COBAL and JCL to pencil sharpening for any competent programmer.
I recommend getting some marshmallows, sitting back, and enjoying watching them burn consequent to their own stupidity.