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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: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday April 29 2017, @01:06PM (2 children)
Good grief. If a programmer is even moderately competent, they won't need a "course" in COBAL. Like almost any other computing language of its vintage, it can be learned on one's own in a very short amount of time. I'm not even sure how many computing languages I know at the "no problem" level at this point, I'd really have to work to list them all, and there are quite a few more at the "give me a day to refresh my memory" level I could get by in just fine. I'm hardly alone in this. Also, in point of fact, COBAL's not a very difficult language. Yes, I'm old enough to have written code in it.
The problem here – if there even really is one – would be one of finding people with knowledge of the systems and techniques in question. Wading into a large corpus of code blind is no picnic, no matter what the language is. But again, there are many, many people who could do it, given enough time to look at the existing system.
Put the job out on offer, attach enough money to it, and the people needed will come out of the woodwork.
OTOH, don't advertise, or offer lowball salaries... or both... yep, that would cause a problem.
<sarcasm>And we all know the banks just have no money to spare to properly maintain their systems.</sarcasm>
(Score: 5, Informative) by tibman on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:49PM (1 child)
I applied to a government position for writing cobal. Didn't even come close. #1 reason, no college (and they ignore all non-cobal experience). #2 reason, i wasn't old. It's a good ol' boys club in there. That's why there aren't enough cobal programmers. They want it that way.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:08PM
Yep. Well, if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, by all means, we should learn to enjoy watching their feet bleed. I'm 100% there, myself.