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: 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.
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(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.