The Governor of the US state of New Jersey is appealing for help in maintaining their elderly COBOL-based mainframe systems <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/05/new_jersey_seeks_cobol_volunteers/> that process welfare benefit requests. The volume of requests has gone up a lot lately, and the systems are having trouble coping. By the way, I don’t understand this “ugly side of technical debt” phrase. Does technical debt have a pretty side?
By the way, I don’t understand this “ugly side of technical debt” phrase. Does technical debt have a pretty side?
Never heard "debt" being called "pretty" by anyone either... Sounds more like a tautology to drive the point home. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
I was surprised in modern day America to see this as even within the article it is stated as a"crusty and dusty legacy code." Cheers John On 6/04/20 2:00 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
The Governor of the US state of New Jersey is appealing for help in maintaining their elderly COBOL-based mainframe systems <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/05/new_jersey_seeks_cobol_volunteers/> that process welfare benefit requests. The volume of requests has gone up a lot lately, and the systems are having trouble coping.
By the way, I don’t understand this “ugly side of technical debt” phrase. Does technical debt have a pretty side? _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list -- wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz | To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/postorius/lists/wlug.list.waikato.ac.nz
On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 14:00:45 +1200, I wrote:
The Governor of the US state of New Jersey is appealing for help in maintaining their elderly COBOL-based mainframe systems ...
Seems the need is wider than just one US state: IBM itself is now running an effort to try to find COBOL programmers to maintain all these old systems <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/ibm-scrambles-to-find-or-train-more-cobol-programmers-to-help-states/>. The irony of IBM now being the “face of COBOL”, if you like, is that the language was created by an industry consortium without the cooperation of IBM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CODASYL>. Instead, the world’s biggest computer company (at the time) was trying to promote its own all-singing, all-dancing PL/I programming language. So COBOL really became dominant in business use in spite of IBM’s efforts, not because of them.
Seems like COBOL is getting a bit more into the news lately. Cloudflare <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/16/cloudflare_cobol/> is now offering a service to compile COBOL code into ... wait for it ... WebAssembly. This is not for running in the browser, but in their “Workers” service. As for the virtues (or lack of them) of COBOL, let me just point out that it was originally created for coding “business applications”. But just a decade or two after it came out, businesses started making more and more use of SQL databases. Nowadays we interface to these by dynamically constructing SQL statements, a technique which requires languages that have good string-manipulation facilities. Which are conspicuously lacking in COBOL. So a “business-oriented” language no longer matches with current “business” needs.
participants (3)
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john -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Peter Reutemann