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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 sjames on Saturday April 29 2017, @06:52PM (1 child)
There is a lot to this. Few business processes call for complex mathematics or manipulation. It is the same operations carried out on a large array of objects. Mainframes don't have super powerful CPUs, they have many fast I/O processors. In the older systems, the software isn't adapted to business practices, business practices are adapted to the needs of data processing. That's why they were able to do so much with machines that are positively anemic by today's standards.
That's the mindset needed to work on these legacy systems.
Somewhat newer but still old systems will use transaction processing, but will still present a green screen. No splat looking picture to dispense milk and cookies. Incidentally, also no need to take your hands off of the keyboard every few seconds. In some cases, you can just put one hand on the numeric pad and off you go. Data entry is designed to work with the software, not the other way around.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:01PM
Might explain why bank-2-bank transfers happens in a batch fashion and not in an instant. And why they are totally unable to deliver a transaction log in a encrypted format via email. Which would be great to ensure bills are paid and scams are thwarted.