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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @12:11AM (2 children)
Then on top of that. These are the sort of systems that *MUST* run. I mean if they fuck up entire large multi national companies will go under in 1-2 weeks due to the fact they would not be able to pay anyone or transact business. When they said to big to fail. They meant it.
The technical people are keenly aware of the monster. They *DO* *NOT* *FUCK* with it. Tech debt is a mountain that will never be undone.
Money is not really the problem. These large banks have thousands of competent programmers. The problem is how do you replace the engine of a car that is driving 200 MPH. There is decades of tech debt in there. Some of these banks have been chewing on their tech stacks since the 60s.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
Build a new engine that traffic is redirected to bit by bit. After extensive testing of course, like sitting in parallel and comparing results for 2 years.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday April 30 2017, @08:11PM
The COBOL environments I worked in didn't have "traffic" to "redirect". Those barfwords showed up when the marketdroids figured out the web could be used for advertising*.
However I can imagine someone cobbling together a web front end with an interface to a COBOL back end, which I would expect to be an abomination you couldn't pay me enough to touch.
* Also known as "the end of modern civilization".