I knew punch cards would return!

[Thomas Okken]

(04-19-2018 02:38 PM)moonbeam Wrote:  

(04-19-2018 12:11 PM)david sanz Wrote:  It is my understanding that most banks are still using COBOL today, at least in Spain.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were more lines of COBOL code running on production systems today than those of all other programming languages combined.

Exactly.

I used to work for a large American phone company, and the middle tier systems ran Unix with application code (in K&R C) going back to the '70s, and the back-end systems were IBM mainframes running databases and business logic (COBOL) that were even older.

The general rule was: never rewrite anything. It's not that they're in the habit of losing their source code, it's because starting over would be insanely expensive, and debugging all those millions of lines of new code would be hellish-to-impossible.

They did do a pretty thorough job for Y2K compatibility. Changing 2-digit years to 4-digit, checking business logic everywhere, and running endless regression tests. When the new millennium finally arrived, nothing bad happened.

Youngsters often scoff at what they see as bloated or crusty bureaucracies, but by god, these guys knew how to keep things running. I have since worked for a company that has more of a start-up mentality, and it shows: we crank out new functionality faster, but we also have more downtime. Take your pick.