I glanced at this and ended up spending 20 minutes reading it and I regret nothing: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money
(Mostly of geek interest: About the continuing survival/blessing/curse of COBOL)
@timbray
It's a story about technical debt. The contradiction between "COBOL democratized coding. Companies could take everyday people and train them to be useful COBOL programmers in a few months" and "the bank no longer employs anyone who understands COBOL as well as Thomas does" is a stark reminder that coding isn't the hard part of software development.
@Biggles @dagon @timbray
Yes and no.
While I agree that the specific language helps only so much, some languages can still make a difference.
At least in my professional experience, onboarding new people on large projects written in a minimalist, type-driven language such as #elm was significantly faster than comparable projects written in #javascript, #java or #ruby.
It is also much, much more difficult for inexperienced people to make costly mistakes.
COBOL and JCL are not difficult languages to learn.
The problem is that any given *system* is *thousands* of those programs interacting in all kinds of subtle and complex ways.
And that COBOL, as a language, is so limited that thousands of subtle dependencies between far-flung programs are inevitable. Finding all of them impossible. And any failure can kill the whole business.
@dagon @timbray @paninid I’ve had several opportunities to take COBOL jobs since I had two years of it plus AS/400 dev and maintenance in school and still grok it a bit but it would just be a slog of a platform to maintain. My sister-in-law made a lot of money being the “nobody else knows COBOL like Becky” person at several companies and retired several years early after being able to demand remote work for decades.
@bflipp @dagon @timbray @paninid
When I was at the bank in late 70s early 80s there were already itinerant COBOLers who specialized in adding tax code changes every year. Same thing later on with payroll systems. I had a decent paycheck in the 70s, all of $11,500/year for an entry level job, which would be $57K and change in 2023 dollars.
@dagon @timbray
This. I learned COBOL in college. It's not super hard. The issue here isn't the language. The issue is "hey - we have a code base that is mission-critical, and has grown over the years, implements some ugly financial procedures that you may not understand, and none of the original folks who understand it are still around, and if you screw it up it could cost millions"- the language is *irrelevant*. I'd hesitate to touch something with those specs written in any language, not just COBOL.