COBOL is not obsolete?
problem is that the original COBOL programmers were expecting their stuff to be replaced within a decade, they never realized that companies would never pay to replace something if it was still (barely) functional after years of neglect – now those programs have become the backbone of their company and they’re having to shell out because it takes a special breed to learn COBOL in the day of C, C++, C#, Elixir, Nim, Crystal, JavaScript, Lua, GDScript, Dart, Swift, Kotlin, Clojure, …, …, …
Veronica Explains has recently quit COBOL. You might find her video interesting.
Tl:dw; She’s a social person and cobol is an antisocial type of job, there’s nothing wrong with the cobol job industry as a whole, and it’s generally an incredibly stable position to have.
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Veronica Explains has recently quit COBOL
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Almost half of international fintech services are running on COBOL
Banks, Insurance , etc. are ultraconservative as far as tech. They want ultra stable systems. I had an acquaintance that had a business reselling ATMs to banks. Banks had a hard time sourcing EOL ATMs or spares. I remeber a story about some specific 486s CPUs and SIMMs that sold for 1000s, due to not being sourceable new from any supplier, and being needed as replacements for certain ATMs
Banks and insurance companies are also scared shitless of something breaking during upgrades to systems that control billions in funds
GNU Cobol is interesting, but note that most COBOL running in production is using other compilers and operating systems. MicroFocus and IBM COBOL are the most popular ones. They are usually executed on IBM operating systems like z/OS or IBM i, which have a hardware a bit different from a normal PC/server.
I’m almost a boomer. I started out in a Big Iron shop that mainly ran Cobol I haven’t touched it in decades, and I was an Admin, so I barely touched the stuff. Now I could read the stuff, but not code a hello world.
A few years back a friend my age, who was a CS major, but had mainly been a mom for 2 decades returned to the job market, thinking that she faced an impossible task, that she had obsoleted herself. She was working within a week, maintaining Cobol at a bank, and making mint.
