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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: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday April 29 2017, @07:23PM (3 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Saturday April 29 2017, @07:23PM (#501635)

    reimplement these legacy systems with some sort of accuracy.

    That is why you wouldn't be considered. And why your plan is a fail before it starts. When you are processing trillions yet keeping only fractions of pennies on most transactions you do not want to hear about "some sort of accuracy" at all. You do not want to translate into a 'modern' language either. Show me ONE real world program written in the 'modern' languages which is not a bloat hog of security exploits waiting to be found? Combine exploitable code that communicates as a primary function and Sagan's of cash and it would be a virtual batsignal for the underworld. Pretty much the only known way to get modern code that is provably safe is to get DJB to write it, but DJB doesn't scale well.

    The other unspoken problem replacing the aging cobol coders is the hard one. The original bunch slowly built these systems and the banks had little choice as there were no old stable coders. There was only a few problems, at least that became known. But now they do not want some young hipster rock star programmer coming in and becoming disgruntled, implanting a nasty and retiring to Aruba with a few million skimmed out of the system. The background checks to get into that elite club of programmers trusted to touch systems and code processing trillions have to be far worse than the President's Secret Service detail.

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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday April 29 2017, @07:28PM (2 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 29 2017, @07:28PM (#501636) Journal

    Hmmm.. sounds like religious reverence for mysterious old code... the Wisdom of the Ancients. Things have moved on in the last 50 years. And when I say "modern languages" I don't mean C++, Javascript and PHP.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:24AM (1 child)

      by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:24AM (#501758) Journal

      Modern, well sometimes time gives us more backwards languages. Not progress.. ;-)

      Languages should be put to a test where they have to be self hosted on a really small system. That way messy programmers won't pass.
      8-bit 16 kB RAM ? ;)