alt Hacker NewsWhen you bank, COBOL (40% of online banks). When you use the ATM, COBOL (95% of ATM transactions). When you travel, COBOL (96% of airline ticket bookings). Healthcare, COBOL. Social Security, COBOL. Point of Sale, COBOL. IRS, COBOL. Pension funds? COBOL. Hotel bookings? COBOL. Payroll programs? COBOL.
It is estimated that there is 800 billion lines of COBOL code in production systems in daily use. That is a bit more than 100 lines.
This was why Y2K genuinely scared everyone and was a very real problem. The only reason we can look back at it and laugh now is that an army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.
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I'm a big enjoyer of arcain arts, but I happen to work in a place that actually has it and no -- nobody likes COBOL and it's not cool in any sense.
Legacy code yeah, nobody's hitting File > New Project in COBOL
It's just that nobody understands how the systems work and they're ossified. Those systems are going to be emulated until our grandchildren take over because nobody can understand them well enough to craft a replacement. Juuuust up until an LLM rewrites them for us.
[edit] I mean those airlines systems are so old that they don't support special characters on names, passenger names are two fixed-length fields (first name, last name) and title and middle name just gets appended together.
So you get LASTNAME/FIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAMENTITLE on your bookings. And each of those fields is truncated lol.
and of course flight numbers are fixed at 4 digits, so we're running out of those.
Not exactly a great ad.
The Y2K effort was much more nuanced than this. I was there for it and it was more like highly targeted patching based on carefully crafted test sets and frameworks.
> army of engineers sat down and rewrote it all in the nick of time.
No way did all get rewritten. Where source was available, fixes were applied and systems retested.
True drama ensued for programs for which the source was no longer obtainable.
The company I was at during that time had programs that had been in production since at least 1960.
The other effort that took place was attending to the systems during the midnight boundary with everybody either in the office or on call.
The other strong observation was that the risks were very much not understood, with exaggerations both extreme and dismissive. Also not discussed in the popular press at the time was the extent that most of these systems were not truly totally automated.