COBOL Controls Your Money
wealthsimple.com
wealthsimple.com
COBOL is better designed and less error prone to work with money that many newer languages. I would not code device drivers in COBOL, why should I code financial applications in Rust/Kotlin...?
> Being “stable” and old, though, can create a paradox — a curse of success. Because when code runs nicely without anyone needing to check up on it, eventually people drift away. They stop looking at it, stop inspecting it. And that means they stop understanding how, precisely, it works.
Maybe the problem is not the language but the engineering processes, or lack of, that plague our industry.
Square is going to keep booming. I bought most of shares at $47-$57 in the spring, and I just saw them blow past $206 this morning. I ditched my Wells Fargo accounts in the summer, and haven't looked back. Cash App is easy to use, and they can make loans that ordinary banks never will.
If you want to compare notes and see how we did in 2030, I'm maxharris9 on Twitter.
Cars are not COBOL and massive interconnected financial networks. How many Tesla crashes have been attributed to failures in self-driving. Way more than failed wire transfers, pension payments, bond issuances, dividend payments, cleared stock transactions, etc.
Square is not a money center bank nor a major broker-dealer and they never will be. Their business is point-of-sale not international FX, issuing securities, managing trillions in pensions, etc.
How much of the global financial flow does Square have? A rounding error.
The argument is now about the merits of Square vs Citibank, saying Square is bad, or that they won't grow (I own it too). The author's point in the article is the this bullet proof code, while very out of fashion, is durable and has been proven over time so it is likely to be around for a long time still. (Lindy Effect [1])
EDIT: Who is you broker? One of the fancy new mobile apps like Robinhood (I use 'em too). Guess what? They've cleared trades through APEX, an old-school firm likely with COBOL inside, until recently. Turns out brokerage ops are challenging as Robinhood found out at exactly the wrong time [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
[2] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/the-robinhood-outage-is-a-cautio...
Square is not a money center bank nor a major broker-dealer and they never will be.
I say they will be, you say they won't. Let's revisit this in a decade when we actually know which one of us is right.
I hate COBOL with a passion. I spent a year of my life working with it (Micro Focus COBOL on Solaris!) and my hope is that every single line of it gets ripped out and replaced with something reasonable.