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posted by chromas on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-cobalt dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The governor of New Jersey has asked COBOL-capable coders to volunteer their skills as the State’s mainframe computers have struggled to cope with a surge of requests for benefits to help citizens through the coronavirus crisis.

COBOL - common business-oriented language - was first introduced in the early 1960s and achieved the then-important trick of offering programmers a language that could work across multiple manufacturers' proprietary computers.

[...] In his daily press briefing on April 4th, governor Phil Murphy said: “In our list of volunteers not only do we need health care workers but given the legacy systems we should add a page for cobalt [sic] computer skills, because that's what we're dealing with in these legacies.”

[...] It appears that New Jersey needs COBOL coders because its benefits system has choked on a surge of requests for unemployment payments.

[...] [C]ommissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Robert Asaro-Angelo explained that his agency has experienced a 1600 percent increase in its usual volume of requests for assistance.

[...] At Governor Murphy’s April 2nd briefing he said: “This morning the Department of Labor reported that over the past week more than 206,000 new claims for unemployment were filed, meaning that in just the past two weeks alone more than 362,000 residents have filed for unemployment. “

Does anybody know where he could find someone looking for work?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:38AM (#980208)

    I'll give you an example of a COBOL issue a friend of mine ran into at a place he consulted with had. They had an online banking system that did something through CGI. The problem is that the upper management decided to push online banking so that way they could charge money to the people who didn't switch. Now if you remember how the old CGI worked, it required one process per action. My understanding is that this process had to connect to a database and then submit whatever to the system that actually tried to do what was requested.

    So what is the problem? Their license didn't allow more than a certain number of simultaneous database connections and only a certain amount of scaling in both directions. They pushed it for awhile, until they got busted in an audit. So they had to pay my friend's group a boat-ton of money to rewrite the program to allow each process to do multiple requests, in order to cut down on the connections and scaling. So they had to write a new system that had identical behavior and was bug-compatible with the decade-old, statically-compiled system with no syntax sugar, comments, documentation, or tests. The test suite alone took them at least a week of 12-hour days of reverse-engineering until they were confident in it enough to actually start on the program proper. I only remember that because my friend got his first day off since they started to celebrate and drowned the rest of the brain cells that the work hadn't.