US banks rely on a 65-year-old programming language | Hacker News Reader

US banks rely on a 65-year-old programming language

economictimes.indiatimes.com

15 pointsindigodaddy8 comments

Is relying on a 65 year old programming language much worse than relying on a 54 year old one?

In the case of COBOL vs C, maybe, but not for reasons of age.

It seems to be nearly forgotten that Once Upon a Time, business and scientific computing were more or less different universes.

The two paradigms eventually merged, but there was a problem: it wasn't really a merger. It was more that scientific computing became the implied default, and simply absorbed new and emerging business use cases over time, and actual business computing languished in senescent obscurity.

Scientific computing precepts are dreadful at business use cases (and the reverse is true as well). For an example, one need look no further than the horrors of IEEE 754 in financial calculations, which even Microsoft has admitted are a problem(1).

Now here we are. Every "general purpose" computing architecture and platform out there - from Windows on x86-64 to macOS on aarch64 to Linux on RV64 - is derived from the scientific computing lineage and paradigms.

Small wonder that modernizing and porting decades-old business software is a nightmare.

(1) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

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This article is a lie. Cobol is still developed and far far from the original lang. It supports ibject oriented programming for example.

Its like C++ - changing and evolving.

It works and its battle tested. 99% people criticizing cobol never actually used it or worked with it

Time to switch to PL/I

I know of a place that still uses PL/B, and apparently the language is a hellscape where keywords like "for" or "to" can be redefined on the fly. It sometimes takes a debugger and a copy of the spec to find out what actually happened in a program when it goes south.

So? If it works it works.

I guess banks don't want to invest in training their people.

Or people don’t want to be trained in it because while you’re doing it the industry keeps on inventing new things you’re supposed to know.

I’ve been offered a job doing cobol and another legacy language on core banking systems and I’m going to take it. I’m getting toward the end of my career so the risk is low and the work might be more interesting than fighting npm or feeding questions into a clanker

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