OK, someone had to say it. Now get on with working.

...and a good public ridicule.

Oh, how we laugh.

+1 vote for Article of the Month.

B

I always thought that COBOL's

IF A=2 OR 3 THEN

was more elegant than other language's

IF (A=2) OR (A=3) THEN

I'm sure that must be the real reason for its longevity.

[/sarcasm]

Think of it this way ... if COBOL were running your life support machine would you really want to just chuck it out and starting again? No. Of course not. So why should people whose paycheck depends on it be any different?

It's not just a switch you can flick and anyone who thinks it is is obviously sitting in front of their PC writing software for themselves and no-one else. "Managed change", it's what keeps business running. A few years out in industry and that would be painfully clear to you.

"Get rid of that legacy crap" - reminds me of when I was young and stupid. Now I'm just ... Hang on. That's not worked ...

Why would they need to 'reconfigure' the system, I'd say a payroll system already has ways to increase or decrease payment?

Otherwise, hire some people to manually enter the reduced wages, probably a lot cheaper :)

What? You moron! If the state actually spent money to upgrade, they wouldn't be in this mess.

Friends of mine still work at the Florida state university system IT department.

For literally decades, state computer departments have been going "can we upgrade from this frigging COBOL???!! PLEEEEZE?!!" and the state goes "NO MUNNY 4 J00!!"

You really don't think the IT departments have been fighting to keep COBOL, do you?

So they end up in this... er... state.

I would be surprised if a pay rise were not implemented recently, or if it took so long. Does COBOLl not accept negatives?

Well done the old buckaroos.

> Get rid of that legacy crap.

Sure... just turn it all off... shut 'em down...

Oh, dear, the world's banking systems just stopped... so did the majority of the international financial services sector... I wonder what happened..?

Get a brain and a life, dweeb.

That's obviously a typo - it must be $30 million, in which case it's a tiny proportion of the budget deficit (although still a ridiculous sum of money).

The republican governer reduced salaries, the democrat councillor refused to implement the cuts. There was a law suit, the council lost and now they have come up with a "The dog ate my homework" excuse to prevent them carrying it out.

You can bet that if there was a need to raise salaries they would find a solution pretty quickly.

Lub COBOL, But seriously are they finding that hard to find programmers - should be lots given they got rid of a load of COBOL programmers. Oh wait, the ironey, the pain.

--

PIC X OCCURS DEPENDING UPON LAUGHS

Who needs a CICS programmer? This COBOL debacle is nothing compared to what will happen when that goes wrong for someone.

Fair enough, it's not a language, but the principle is the same. Most of the world hasn't even heard of it. Most would assume that something computer related that's almost 40 years old must be dead, but that's just the same sort of breathtaking ignorance shown by modern PHBs (including el Governator) when it comes to "Legacy" stuff.

I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but ask any of your nearby PHBs if they've heard of it, or if they know what Microsoft's actual software market share is in terms of cashflow and you'll realise they really just don't have a clue (To save you looking it up, It's around 10%, most people will say 80% or more)

Paris, because she's the kind of PHB I could live with - easier on the eye than most, and dead easy to baffle...

Oh, but they tried that with Hotmail and that didn't go so well...

My rate for COBOL is double that for Java etc so no complaints from me if someone wants to pay me for it.

No, you know what, I know a bit of that language. I'm off to start a legacy-systems consultancy firm called the Lords of Cobol!

It's the ones with the viper pilot badge on it.

In a former life, as a COBOLer, what struck me was the way all literal fields were hard-coded into the reports. This meant that when the company changed names, we had to go through every single report and amend the appropriate PICT fields. Could have all been fixed with a few lines of code to read such details from a file at the start of a batch run.

I suspect California's payroll is held on ISAM files, which should be easy enough to patch en masse, with a bit of effort. There's probably even an ODBC driver available! Sounds like the old-timers and their managers have colluded to drag their heels on this chage. Can't think why.

Steve would be more than happy to sell California some "modern" cr@p to replace the lecagy cr@p.

A replacement system for $30bn? 10,000 programmers at $1 million p.a.? Before packing my bags to head on over there I checked the original article and re-thought my plans when I read it was only $30 million that was quoted.

Maybe that's the tactic that the IBM sales team should have used...

"New system? That'll be $30bn."

"How much!?"

"OK, we can do it for a 1000th of the price."

"That's better. Where do I sign?"

Dijkstra's comments anent COBOL are an exaggeration. It's quite easy to write structured code in COBOL merely by showing a little discipline in your coding style. Indeed, the COBOL got rid of the infamous "go to depending on" construct quite a while ago, though it left the "go to" intact.

In saying this, I am not claiming that all those billions of line of COBOL code are structured: in my working days I saw some horrific tangles of COBOL spaghetti code, but that was equally true of all the older languages: Fortran, PL/1, even Algol.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to read that the backends of some modern online systems have been written in COBOL.

AFAICT, the languages most often used today embody their own very serious defects. The interminable issue with buffer overflows is due to the absence of built-in array bounds checking, and there are intricacies to the syntax of the C family of languages that make them prone to whole new classes of programming errors that can be extremely difficult to isolate.

COBOL, by its very wordiness and its demand that everything be explicitly declared, precludes many such errors.

No, I'm not saying that we should re-write everything in COBOL. But please don't think that the current generation of programming languages is the end all and be all. I will make a possible exception in favor of Ada, but who uses Ada?

The next "Red Sonia."

So, how many people who know some COBOL are going to throw in their application? I did COBOL in high school and college around the time of the Y2K threat. I still have some of my books from classes, and even bought some others along the years. Sadly, I even dust off my COBOL skills once in a while by firing up RM*COSTAR in CrossPC on my Amiga.

That's a true story, by the way. But closer to reality, I know at least a couple of people who have done COBOL professionally recently. One of them worked for ACS, which I believe is a big enough company to do work for the SoC.

Paris, dusting off her skills just in case they're ever needed.

...that's much much better than SAP.

Many years ago, a customer wanted us to include a new feature in our software. We had plenty of other things to work on that were higher priority, so we put him off. But he was persistent, insistent and consistent in his request. Finally our company owner quoted him a price just to shut him up.

"Forty thousand dollars...that's the fee for your custom feature request."

(Ha! That'll keep him quiet!)

The customer pulled out his corporate check ledger and wrote out a check on the spot.

"Guys? You know that feature we've been back-burnering for the last year, for that one customer who kept asking? The one that's less important than anything else we're doing? Guess what..."

Maybe IBM figured they could avoid the job if they quoted a high enough price?

This is a standard ploy for IT (well, not only IT) firms who don't want the specific contact but still want to get future pork, er, contracts from an existing customer.

You give a ridiculously high figure to undertake the project to effectively tell the customer that it's an expen$ive favour .

If you get the contract, well, you're in the money (unless you are totally incompetent). If you don't get the contract, then you at least "showed interest".

I believe Admiral Hopper also coined the term "debugging" and "bug" in the late 1940s in relation to computing.

She does get around, doesn't she...

Well, I speak COBOL, being over 50... In fact, I think I invented recursive COBOL, where a program can actually call itself with new variables, and then return up the stack to to caller.

But, would I want to work for an administration that is likely to cut my contract fees if I made it work? Not so sure...

Paris, because I'm sure she could do herself recursively....

Actually, as every geek who ever freeze-framed the first movie on video has known ever since the '80s, the T-101 was programmed in 6502 assembler[*]... none of that poncy HLL stuff for a low-down dirty killing machine like that!

[*] - and had several alternative possibilities for how to respond to that janitor beyond "Fuck you, asshole"....

All that and no mention of technology debt?

Setting aside the fact I'd eat a bullet before writing another line of COBOL code, the reason to get rid of it is really because stuff like this keeps happening, and it will keep getting worse and more expensive every time it does.

Pay someone to make something you can control/maintain/upgrade easily now, or spend much more than that maintaining it over the next decade or two.

And... For me, and for the children, please, kill COBOL now. For a brighter tomorrow.