- COBOL programs have history. They were changed in '77 and then the change was reverted in '79 and then again in '84. Nobody really remembers why.
- COBOL programs do what they do. They do not have specs, but if that's the way we have been computing account interests for the last 50 years, they are right. It's lawyers documenting them, not the other way around.
- COBOL programmers were often meant to be "less" than real programmers. More like junior accountants automating boring procedures, than C wizards. Wizards would not touch COBOL code with a stick. This often shows.
This said, the kind of things you could do on a IBM mainframe in the '70s (virtualization, data safety and efficiency, disaster recovery, even uptime) still run rings around the 90-core boxes with Linux that are in your datacenter racks.
I wonder how different it would be if they had a good source control system (and used it). Would you be able to look at the history and understand why the changes were made, or would you just get a bunch of commit messages like "made update" or "reverted earlier change"?
Not only did I have source control I had flow diagrams of the entire system for all points in the chain. My code reviews had me doing line-by-line justifications. I wrote tests.
Just because the technology and practitioners are old it doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
Generally they invented whatever "you" are reinventing the first time around.
There are teams which require all changes come via defined channel (like bug tracker or special email), and which put ticket # in each commit (like Gitlab -- see the "closes #..." at the commit message [0])
But many teams have no procedure, or the procedure is optional -- and there you can easily get "made update" commits.
And nothing around them is standard either. No database, no best practices, no comments in code. Combined with
> OBOL programmers were often meant to be "less" than real programmers.
you get programs that are completely unmaintainable. Contrast this with the first versions of UNIX or BSD (written around the same time) and you can still build and understand them pretty easily. That's the difference between programmers and software engineers.
> This said, the kind of things you could do on a IBM mainframe in the '70s (virtualization, data safety and efficiency, disaster recovery, even uptime) still run rings around the 90-core boxes with Linux that are in your datacenter racks.
All through obscure, proprietary APIs and along with a hefty support contract from IBM. Making sure nobody in academia or in SV could get within 500m of a mainframe sure helped them become more than a niche.
It takes a whole lot less time for an experienced COBOL dev to understand a program than it takes for an experienced programmer who just learned COBOL to understand it in my experience.
NOBODY is willing to spend money for maintenance on ANYTHING, look at our infrastructure.
If it wasn't for the FAA making it illegal to not maintain planes, we'd be seeing the same thing with airlines and their planes.
We are seeing this with the Air Force right now, where they are now trying to reverse engineer parts for planes and then 3d print those parts, because no one was willing to spend the money to maintain documentation, maintain vendors, and parts inventory, etc.
Software is especially vulnerable to this phenomenon, because it's not physical so it's considered to be completely fungible, but in fact it's even harder to maintain than physical systems.
The same way Wall Street rewarded companies that closed factories, and outsourced physical locations, and staff, they've also rewarded companies that have eliminated maintenance.
That's just the way it is.
It does (effectively), the problem is that it is on a long enough time span that the dividends don't appear until long after the decision makers are all long gone. Executives need to be compensated with annuities depending on the future performance of the company to disincentivise slash & burn profit farming.
In my experience management sidesteps that problem by insisting that you're an incompetent fool if you need time and money to accomplish anything.
Rehiring talent costs - on average - an annual salary. If more of us grew a spine, we wouldn't see the management/IT-ops staging a recreation of the stereotypical high-school jocks/nerds conflict.
That's best-case scenario - an ordinary cog in a big team supporting well-documented/tested and fairly generic, simple software. A friend of mine did a research paper and said it's more like 3 years annual salary in most companies because:
* Loss of productivity during notice period
* Onboarding time of new staff
* Negative impact on morale of rest of team
* Rest of team needing to support work
* Recruiters fees
* Time spent recruiting
* Customer frustration
* Replacing them with someone worse
* Extra mistakes
I cannot upvote this enough.
I haven't seen a company change mind so fast until 3/4 of a huge team (25-30 people) team left the company within 6-8 months.
Everytime the bank tries to switch away from COBOL they run into problems ranging from code latency to lack of support for certain features in the new language among other issues thus far.
I really don’t know what the banks that run cobol mainframes are going to do as most have ignored the Father Time problem where cobol programmers aren’t getting any younger and the language, in my opinion, is miserable compared to the “magic” of newer era languages.
My pops also has made less money then I did as an engineer at a tech co with 3 years experience so banks aren’t valuing the work these folks do very much either.
I’ve told my pops he can do consulting once he retires and make a killing because there’s gonna be a major shortage of cobol folks and a massive amount of mainframe code out there that needs maintenance or a transition into a newer era language.
Edit: - The author is wrong here
“If you need to change old programs, hiring experienced programmers and teaching them COBOL is the cheap part.”
There is not a surplus of developers or entry level folks willing to learn cobol over another entry level language, so it’s not cheap and it’s not “easy”.
Wrong, there are literally 10,000s of former cobol developers due to decades of offshoring. I know of several thousand in from one local company alone. Go look for these job listings, you won't find them because they're all offshore.
I see the fingerprints of almost feudal organization structure the other aspects when I first read about the New Jerseys problem with COBOL.
No, they were writing the typical corporate applications - an interface to enter data into a database, or to run a query and generate some nicely formatted output. They were the equivalent of a modern day webdev.
It's worth it if you have all the supporting pieces in place. For example if your OS provides record-oriented I/O and your hardware platform provides dedicated processors for accelerating I/O, then you can write a very small, efficient program to, say, calculate today's interest rate and apply it to millions of accounts. But if you don't have those things then you need to write a lot more code and/or have another program (e.g. a database server) to try and emulate them in software, and it will be slower because it has the overhead of calling between components rather than being tightly integrated.
There are materials for learning COBOL. Here are some materials from the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe project:
https://www.openmainframeproject.org/projects/coboltrainingc...
And when there was a call last year for COBOL programmers to help some of these aging systems, a lot of people immediately popped up: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-linux-foundation-se...
While COBOL has its quirks, it's not that hard to learn. It even has some advantages, for example, it has built-in support for fixed-point decimal arithmetic.
In general, COBOL is the scapegoat, not the actual problem.
No, the analogy is perfectly apt. Electric vehicles are rapidly replacing gasoline vehicles. There is no oil to change in an electric car! Better languages have long since surpassed COBOL.
Serverless is Mainframe(COBOL) without transactions
> For evidence of how easy it is to learn programming languages, one of the authors of the current paper has, over the course of his life, learned 18 distinct programming languages. His father, a physics professor, claims to have used 20 and 30 programming languages. A quick poll of engineers at Lucid Software showed that this was not unique, with all of the engineers having used at least two programming languages, and the majority having used somewhere between 5 to 20.
I'm curious as to how different the languages that they're referring to are.
Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, C, C++, D, and Java are all really similar to each other relative to the differences between them and Coq, Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, Prolog, Io, Spiral, FORTH, or Chapel.
|Functional|Prodedural
Loose | Elixir, Lisp? | Ruby, Python
No idea if that rendered right at all, such is life. Seems like Lisp-esq languages are kind of a category on their own, but what's an oversimplified taxonomy without some really forced placements?
From our experience with VBA users, this is only true for non-technical (as in STEM background) users when it comes to languages with a close-to-English syntax together with tightly integrated IDE/editor. Lua, Python (and occasionally Ruby) are two other languages that are quite "easy" to learn. The curly braces languages? Not so much. Java is especially bad due to its poor error messages and opaque package management/build tools. However being easy to learn for the users doesn't mean the users are capable of writing good code. We found that code written by amateur users tend to be rather unstructured and incoherent. On the other hand some of the cleanest codebases I have read (from those without formal instruction or experience in software engineering) are by mathematicians and electrical engineers.
In terms of tooling Glitch.com and Repl.it are best in for zero-config workflows.