COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

COBOL's gone? Time to tell grandpa his coding skills are officially retro chic.

I recently found a 3.5” disk image I had with my 1990 COBOL programs on it.

It's tragicomical, since it's at the core of renowned institutions I thought surely this must be a world of logical, crisp perfection. A perfectly engineered engine, surely if these systems are so important and at the very center of what makes society work and all flow of money and whatever, geniuses must have perfected it all thrice-over. I wouldn't say reality was equal to 1/expectations^3 , but maybe 1/expectations^2. Probably no one will relate, a COBOL job was the first developer job of a relatively young guy like me. Crash course in tech-debt, decades worth of managerial shortsighted behavior, bureaucracy and all that. At least the naive hope provided energy to learn it better so it wasn't useless. But maybe it veered on delusion when I hoped to rewrite ALL of it in the company I was.

Frankly, in all these stories about COBOL programs being modified for Y2K and whatever... isn't COBOL a compiled language? What's really amazing is that all these legacy systems have buildable source code and the toolchain to build them with i.e. that that stuff hasn't suffered "bit rot" or other neglect.

Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode last year, "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U

One reason COBOL systems have been around for so long is because they encoded business rules that need to be understood if you want to try to transfer them to a new system. From the podcast (~16m):

> Like when we're working in unemployment insurance, again during the pandemic, my colleague was talking with the claims processors week over week and we're trying to dissect it and figure out what's going wrong and clear this backlog and one of these guys keeps saying, “Well, I'm not quite sure about that answer. I'm the new guy. I'm the new guy.” And she finally says, “How long have you been here?” And he says, “I've been here 17 years. The guys who really know how this works have been here 25 years or more.”

> So think about. You know, going from doing some simple cool, you know, tech app, you know, easy consumer app to trying to build or fix or improve upon a system that is so complex that it takes 25 years to learn how to process a claim.

> That's sort of, I think, what needs to be on the table as part of this agenda is not just “can the tech be better?” But can we go back and simplify the accumulated like 90 years of policy and process that's making that so hard to make?

Also an observation on how decisions are sometimes made:

> And I think that there's a deep seated culture in government where the policy people are the important people. They do the important stuff and technology, digital is just part of implementation, which is not just the bottom of a software development waterfall. It's the bottom of a big rigid hierarchy in which information and power and insights only flows from the top to the bottom.

> And so it's problematic in part because the people who are doing the tech are really just sort of downstream of everything else and the power and ability and willingness to step up and say “Hey, we probably shouldn't do those 6,700 requirements, we should probably focus on these 200, get that out the door and then, you know, add edge cases as as later.” There's no permission really to say that.

Is PERL dead yet?

[dead]