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Is COBOL Holding you Hostage with Math?

posted by martyb on Monday September 16 2019, @01:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the COBOL-is-often-fractionally-better dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://medium.com/@bellmar/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b

Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.

When we talk about COBOL the first question on everyone's mind is always Why are we still using it in so many critical places? Banks are still running COBOL, close to 7% of the GDP is dependent on COBOL in the form of payments from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The IRS famously still uses COBOL, airlines still use COBOL (Adam Fletcher dropped my favorite fun fact on this topic in his Systems We Love talk: the reservation number on your ticket used to be just a pointer), lots of critical infrastructure both in the private and public sector still runs on COBOL.

Why?

The traditional answer is deeply cynical. Organizations are lazy, incompetent, stupid. They are cheap: unwilling to invest the money needed upfront to rewrite the whole system in something modern. Overall we assume that the reason so much of civil society runs on COBOL is a combination of inertia and shortsightedness. And certainly there is a little truth there. Rewriting a mass of spaghetti code is no small task. It is expensive. It is difficult. And if the existing software seems to be working fine there might be little incentive to invest in the project.

But back when I was working with the IRS the old COBOL developers used to tell me: "We tried to rewrite the code in Java and Java couldn't do the calculations right."

[Ed note: The referenced article is extremely readable and clearly explains the differences between floating-point and fixed-point math, as well as providing an example and explanation that clearly shows the tradeoffs.]

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 16 2019, @05:14PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday September 16 2019, @05:14PM (#894694)

    Or other languages. Hey if it's not for your problem domain, don't use it. But don't knock it if it is in widespread use. There is probably a reason for that. Warts and all.

    Counterpoint: Sometimes the platform the thing needs to run on forces you to use a particular language no matter how much it sucks. For example, web browsers only universally understand Javascript, so web developers code Javascript not because they want to but because it's the only choice available. Or writing an application in a machine's machine code because there aren't any compilers / interpreters yet for that CPU and somebody demanded that you write software for it, not because it's a great language.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 16 2019, @06:46PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 16 2019, @06:46PM (#894759) Journal

    In the 70's it was obvious that some machines were 'biased' towards certain languages. Or modes of thinking.

    Developers, like today, or all humans actually, take the path of least resistance.

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