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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: 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..

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  • (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.