Modernizing the Common Language - COBOL 347
Frumious Wombat writes "Over at the Register Developers section, they are quoting the head of research for Ovum Consulting on the continuing dominance of COBOL in certain business applications. The antique language accounted for 75% of all business transactions last year, and some 90% of financial transactions. For all the time spent arguing the merits of Ruby vs. C#, should the community spend more time building tools to make COBOL livable? The article goes into what it terms 'legacy modernization', and lays out some details on how to go about it. From the article: 'The first stage in the legacy modernization process is to understand the business value embodied within legacy systems. This means that developers must give business domain experts (business analysts) access to the legacy, using tools that help them find their way around it at the business level. Some awareness of, say, COBOL and of the legacy architectures will be helpful but we aren't talking about programmers rooting around in code - modern tools can automate much of this analysis for staff working at a higher level.'"
Easy Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Why not just rewrite it in PHP. Another 30 years of guaranteed fat support contracts. Always think of your potential pay-packet.
But it is modern! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Easy Solution (Score:5, Funny)
This will go on for years until the executives give up and hire an outside consultant who will do the whole thing in Java. It will be bloated and inefficient, and the UI will be ugly. People will begin dreaming about rewriting it. Eventually, someone will suggest re-writing the whole thing in PHP...
The Tao of Programming (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But it is modern! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:'legacy modernization' (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, when I saw "Modernize" and "Cobol" in the same sentence I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a Kentucky Fried Chicken spork.
Cobol makes baby Jebus cry!
A Modest Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Now coders can start migrating away from Cobol without the hassle of rewriting entire programs. They can do it one line at a time, as they get to it.
Now if we could just merge Java, & Perl in there you'd really have something.
Lords of COBOL... (Score:5, Funny)
Frank Lloyd Wright (Score:2, Funny)
"Abandon it."
Cross out 'Pittsburgh', replace with 'COBOL', you get the idea.
Re:'legacy modernization' (Score:5, Funny)
Add MODERNIZATION to COBOL giving (MESS given by ADDITION of (SPORK given by ADDITION of FORK to SPOON) to EYES)
That's the modern version. It woulda taken me three lines to do it the old way.
Re:Easy Solution (Score:4, Funny)
"While the FOSS zealots are flaming each other a MS partner shows up and sells them a set of cut rate licenses and thells them how easy it is to develop in VB
The offshoring company still doesn't get it so mgt decides to reel the project back in. They hire a hogshead of onshore VB programmers who kind of sort of get it to work, though it still relies on the legacy system to do the heavy lifting. The project is deemed a success, and goes into a (very expensive) maintnenence mode. The managers spruce up thier resumes and bail.
Meanwhile, in the basement grandpa/ma is sitting in a rocker whittling a new toothpick and keeping the legacy system running. Day by day grandpa/ma marks off the days to retirement after which all hell will break loose. Unless you hire gramps back as a consultant at 3x previous salary".
There, hope this helps.
The lords of Kobol (Score:4, Funny)
Re:From my experience (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, I guess you must be a COBOL programmer, since you seem to like TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
Anyway, the appropriate acronymical expansion of COBOL is 'Confused Oriental Bean-cOunting Langauge.'
Oh, BTW, how's the fingers? Stubs yet?
Re:From my experience (Score:5, Funny)
can't replace the existing 200 billion lines of code.
Sure you can. A 20 line Perl script would probably work just as well.
And you can't maintain 200 billion lines of COBOL, either.
But seriously, COBOL is so verbose that the 200 billion lines of COBOL could probably be replaced by 100 million lines of C++ or Java. And it would be more maintainable. COBOL exists to keep programmers employed; consider what it provides for the programmer:
MULTIPLY HOURL-WAGE-IN-CENTS TIMES HOURS-LOGGED-FOR-THIS-EMPLOYEE-ONLY-NOT-INCLUDING
ADD TEMPORARY-SALARY-FOR-THIS-WEEK TO ONE-TIME-BONUS-FOR-SALARIED-EMPLOYEES-NOT-RECEIVI
MOVE BY NAME TMP-EMPLOYEE-SALARY-CALCULATION-WORKSHEET-STRUCTU
But I jest, of course. The truth is, most businesses are so afraid of moving away from COBOL that they'd rather continue to shell out premium salaries than take the risk of a failed migration. Kind of like a lot of Windows users - they'd like to try Linux, but are afraid of change. Well, I suppose you get what you deserve.
Re:Easy Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Not really. Compile-time type checking catches a certain amount of absent-mindedness and serves as a bit of extra documentation, no more. What Java really does is force people to do things the long, simple, stupid way instead of the clever way. Brian Kernighan wrote, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." The same goes double for your coworkers, who did not write the code in the first place. Many people do not have enough discipline to refrain from cleverness in Perl or Haskell, especially Perl, where one person's everyday tool is another person's obscure little corner of the language.
Re:Easy Solution (Score:1, Funny)