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: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday April 30 2017, @02:24AM (1 child)
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 ? ;)
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday April 30 2017, @08:49AM
FORTH
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].