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posted by on Saturday April 29 2017, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-code-that-wouldn't-die dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:37PM (8 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 29 2017, @02:37PM (#501546) Journal

    The COBOL language also has some serious problems that make programmers balk. One is called COBOL-FINGERS and the rest is generally not a pretty thing. Lack of structure, compatibility issues, verbose syntax supposed to be easily documented and recognized for business people but will do no good for the professional programmer, designed by an incompetent committee from commerce and government (think MBA-PHB) and disdained by the computer science community as a trade school language.

    So they want code grinders for cheap while they themselves make big money from that work. While the former is supposed to mindlessly hammer away on virtual dinosaur mainframes? At the same time there is plenty of more interesting and well paid tasks to accomplish. Considering the mentality and mindset of money commerce and government, that let a incompetent committee decide on design issues. Let them suffer the consequences of their own shortcomings.

    Any idea for a better language that will solve the same tasks but also not have the crap that javascript or php harbours?

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:02PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:02PM (#501566) Journal

    INTERCAL. Yes, it has a bad reputation as well, but that's surely just because most geeks don't like to say PLEASE. ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:26PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:26PM (#501574) Journal

      It can only be better .. :-)

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Uncle_Al on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:03PM (1 child)

    by Uncle_Al (1108) on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:03PM (#501568)

    "designed by an incompetent committee from commerce and government"

    Including Grace Hopper

    The big problem is legacy code isn't "Object Oriented" so kids think it's shit.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:29PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 29 2017, @04:29PM (#501575) Journal

      It takes more than a person to have impact in a committee. The problem with COBOL seems to be that all the actors that should not decide on the matter has done just that. The consequence is felt now. System owners of such code should just endure the consequences as karma.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 30 2017, @01:46AM (3 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 30 2017, @01:46AM (#501748) Homepage Journal

    Any idea for a better language that will solve the same tasks but also not have the crap that javascript or php harbours?

    Try OCaml.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:19AM (2 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:19AM (#501755) Journal

      Perl or Python seems on a quick look to be less convoluted.

      Does COBOL give the programmer any edge at all? Like some languages that protects against memory trashing by preventing array index references to go to far. Or preventing bad variable interpretation by typing them. Or efficiency by handling pointers instead of data. etc..

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:46AM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:46AM (#503432) Homepage Journal

        Cobol does a lot of automatic type conversions. It has types like ten-digit decimal number with two digits after the decimal point. Or three digits. Or whatever the programmer specifies. And it does all the necessary conversions. Might it even do them correctly?

      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:52AM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 03 2017, @02:52AM (#503440) Homepage Journal

        OCaml is preferred by a number of financial institutions. Perhaps because OCaml programs have more of a tendency to run correctly if they run at all than programs in some other commonly used languages. Not that you can't write incorrect programs in it, of course.

        But it won't be a drop-in replacement for COBOL.