- Pays out £70,000 of transactions per SECOND - Despite frenetic activity on their new systems and having an in-house staff of over 700 developers, the "over 50% COBOL" statistic still stands
Maybe systems have been updated, but so often the systems doing the processing are so critical to the organization that updating them just means modifying a few (carefully reviewed) lines of code. Perhaps if someone were creating an entirely new bank, it might be COBOL-free, but that's not all that common (especially weighted by volume of transactions).
My guess is that there are more transactions via COBOL today than 25 years ago for the simple reason that there are far more electronic transactions now - mo
The problem with migrating from these old mature technologies is the fact that they are mature. That credit transaction code has a thousand conditional statements in it dealing with everything from regional financial laws, to the time-zone peculiarities of eastern nowhere where people west of a river go by one time zone and the people east of it another, regardless of anything else any database anywhere days on the matter.
Mature code is ugly but it also transforms the situation into implementation defined
My mother writes COBOL for a living. Her employer services the insurance industry. Not the big boys like Allstate or Liberty Mutual who are big enough to have an in-house software team but little-ish regional companies in places like Upstate New York that are big enough to be insurance companies but too small to justify insourcing their software development.
Many of these little guys have been around for many decades and started going digital versus pencil and paper in the 70s when COBOL was the on
Don't forget non corporate COBOL users.
e.g. The UK Department for Work and Pensions.
- Pays out £70,000 of transactions per SECOND
- Despite frenetic activity on their new systems and having an in-house staff of over 700 developers, the "over 50% COBOL" statistic still stands
Maybe systems have been updated, but so often the systems doing the processing are so critical to the organization that updating them just means modifying a few (carefully reviewed) lines of code. Perhaps if someone were creating an entirely new bank, it might be COBOL-free, but that's not all that common (especially weighted by volume of transactions).
My guess is that there are more transactions via COBOL today than 25 years ago for the simple reason that there are far more electronic transactions now - mo
Mature code is ugly but it also transforms the situation into implementation defined
Get a phone bill? COBOL generated that. Every call, every text, every data packet gets rated. And that rating engine? COBOL.
Flight reservations? COBOL again.
Just two examples that I’ve touched in my professional life routinely. There’s tons more.
Insurance.
My mother writes COBOL for a living. Her employer services the insurance industry. Not the big boys like Allstate or Liberty Mutual who are big enough to have an in-house software team but little-ish regional companies in places like Upstate New York that are big enough to be insurance companies but too small to justify insourcing their software development.
Many of these little guys have been around for many decades and started going digital versus pencil and paper in the 70s when COBOL was the on