retrocomputing

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The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 hours ago by cm0002@no.lastname.nz to c/retrocomputing

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COBOL turned 66 this year and is still in use today. Major retail and commercial banks continue to run core account processing, ATM networks, credit card clearing, and batch end-of-day settlement. On top of that, many payment networks, stock exchanges, and clearinghouses rely on COBOL for high‑volume, high‑reliability batch and online transaction processing on mainframes.

Which reminds me, mainframes are still alive and well too. Banking, insurance, governments, inventory management – all the same places you'll find COBOL, you'll find mainframes as well.

None of that is as sexy as the latest AI program or the newest cloud-native computing release, but old dogs with their old tricks still have useful work to perform.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 10 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Rewriting existing systems is one of the riskiest things a company can do, so old codebases are going to be around for a long time.

Those old COBOL codebases likely contain 50 years of bug fixes for every possible edge case. It'd take a long time to rewrite everything and ensure feature parity, and there's usually not a significant business reason to rewrite it (after all, a successful end result is just that the system behaves exactly the same as the old one).

The COBOL language is still getting updates, too.

[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 7 points 2 hours ago

This is one of the reasons COBOL programmers get paid extremely well. Nobody is learning it anymore and these people are critical if an issue occurs.