“When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned…governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?” Just gonna repost this old article about computers, care, labor, and disinvestment in infrastructure for no reason🙃 logicmag.io/care/built-t... - ThreadSky

histoftech.bsky.social • 7 days ago

“When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned…governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?”

Just gonna repost this old article about computers, care, labor, and disinvestment in infrastructure for no reason🙃

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

Comments

bxbx4.bsky.social•3 days ago

COBOL is a workhorse...if it ain't broke don't change it

zeblarson.bsky.social•7 days ago

I have an essay idea I’ve noodled with to the gist of “what if we treated software the way that they programmed the Voyager Probes?” and this feels related. Endlessly replacing functioning things isn’t progress.

aurelius.quest•7 days ago

I was just explaining to someone today that many of the core systems that banking and utilities and insurance rely on are the same software that has been running for 40+ years because it works and it's been continuously maintained.

They don't gamble with things like that.

aurelius.quest•7 days ago

Yeah the BoA website gets rebuilt every year but the code that moves money from one account to another, not so much.

histoftech.bsky.social•7 days ago

Also please learn about how Jean Sammet was so important to the development of COBOL and NOT Grace Hopper who was barely involved but gets a ton of credit for it🥲

histoftech.bsky.social•7 days ago

(I do talk about this in the article a bit.)

roylonergan.bsky.social•7 days ago

I wrote COBOL in the 80s before I ran away to the circus. It’s fine. I‘d guess though that some of the robustness is less than language and more that it’s typically in core applications that are old, have had the bugs forced out, and now don’t need to change very much.

roylonergan.bsky.social•7 days ago

The CFO of a large insurer told me once that they had products running in 50 year-old COBOL that hadn’t needed changing in decades, which he said was just as well because it wasn’t just that the old programmers had retired but that they were dead.

weirdo95.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thank you. Another heroine of my field to look up to.

keithwilson.eu•7 days ago

I thought Hopper was involved in the design of the programming language Ada, but I seems I might be wrong about that. In any case, it’s a shame Ada never caught on.

keithwilson.eu•7 days ago

*it seems

buckleup36.bsky.social•7 days ago

📌

s73v3r.bsky.social•5 days ago

This was a fantastic article. Thank you for writing it

histoftech.bsky.social•5 days ago

tysm!

adventuresofjoy.bsky.social•5 days ago

📌

2unow.bsky.social•7 days ago

Junk in Junk out

ngrippel.com•7 days ago

The techno-nazi Musk & his DOGE vigilantes are tearing the US federal government to the ground via 10,000s of cuts. When people start complaining, departments will be gutted then everything privatized likely leaving US citizens with little or nothing.

https://www.ngrippel.com/ngr-politics.html

newfie.bsky.social•7 days ago

This was a really great article and fundamentally challenged how I viewed COBOL as a language for grey haired coders who had to see into a crystal ball to divine solutions to ancient systems! I'm now VERY interested in COBOL as a language!

talos-xliv.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thank you for reposting this article; I am very much looking forward to reading it.

davet53.bsky.social•7 days ago

Great article.

pocketunix.bsky.social•7 days ago

I find it interesting that they blame the infrastructure itself but they don't put any effort toward actually maintaining the infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn't maintain itself?? This goes for everything, not just these machines.

ravenonthill.bsky.social•7 days ago

I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually used COBOL. One of the problems of the language is that it looks like English, but the computer doesn't understand it as English and, especially in earlier versions of the language, this led to subtle and nasty bugs. Most of these issues

ravenonthill.bsky.social•7 days ago

have been resolved by subsequent revisions of the language, but it is still quite clumsy and there's a huge amount of old code which still has those problems.

On the other hand, accounting and bookkeeping are not taken seriously by most computer scientists and because of this, there is still no

ravenonthill.bsky.social•7 days ago

better choice for these major and technically uninteresting applications.

So COBOL is a problem, but it's not the problem that interferes with maintaining these systems. (Then we can talk about z/OS JCL, which still thinks it's on punched cards.)

tempus.bsky.social•7 days ago

“Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take.”

This applies to people as well as systems.

freejack.bsky.social•7 days ago

Gotta give it a think, but these things seem related...
(Evolution has wired the human brain in some bizarre ways)

nullinterface.bsky.social•7 days ago

Obfuscation and complexity for complexity's sake endures not only in programming languages but in culture of programming itself. I've encountered all too many real-life examples of the attached meme.

xpressmgnt.bsky.social•7 days ago

As a COBOL Programmer on call i really prefer the KISS principle because at 3AM trying to make some dick's complex code work is a bitch

kageneko.bsky.social•7 days ago

Every programmer ever knows that past-me is the dick we’re talking about.

xpressmgnt.bsky.social•7 days ago

I'm going to guess you were called every name in the book by oncalls

rationallydense.bsky.social•5 days ago

Can't speak for them, but I certainly was when I was oncall.

phdhurtbrain.bsky.social•6 days ago

🔥🔥🔥📌

mikethemadbiol.bsky.social•5 days ago

📌

rogerjacucci.bsky.social•7 days ago

That's weird.

I've got a TRS-80 that's been running the same BASIC program non-stop since 1983...

10 FOR K=0
2O LET K=K+1

Etc...

medialator.bsky.social•7 days ago

"it was the website through which people filed claims, written in the comparatively much newer programming language Java, that was responsible for the errors, breakdowns, and slowdowns."

Are you sure it was Java and not JavaScript?

histoftech.bsky.social•6 days ago

That was what Wired and other outlets reported, yes. Given the age & purpose of those sites I believe they are correct that it was Java, not JavaScript, but I did not personally use those websites at the time to try to verify. The source is linked in the article: https://www.wired.com/story/cant-file-unemployment-dont-blame-cobol/

xpressmgnt.bsky.social•7 days ago

As a COBOL programmer working in the insurance and financial services industry, without the proper maintenance is imperative to keep the system running and tuned

alpha-aurora.bsky.social•7 days ago

You mean blame the feckless repugs

1maltwisky.bsky.social•7 days ago

As an old COBOL programmer I’m always irritated when COBOL is scapegoated by younger software techs and lazy reporters. As with any
computer language, a COBOL program is only as good as its author.

Good article, BTW.

rationallydense.bsky.social•5 days ago

I mean, it's not true that any program is as good as its author. A good type system for instance will make all sorts of bugs impossible, even for a relatively new programmer. By contrast, some languages (*cough* C *cough*) seem designed to encourage buggy code.

weirdo95.bsky.social•7 days ago

COBOL can support systems on a potato where stuff even as dated as java would need a data centre. And it will be there in the next millennium if the hardware still works.

vatrueandblue.bsky.social•7 days ago

Starve the govt of functioning funds then claim it doesn’t work well and we need to privatize make it work better

jeah.bsky.social•7 days ago

So, thank you to you as well 😊

randomcoolzip.bsky.social•7 days ago

COBOL can't make something add up if it doesn't.

njbecho.bsky.social•7 days ago

Here's how we wrangled our COBOL based EI system in Canada to pay Canadians during COVID: https://macleans.ca/politics/pulling-off-a-bureaucratic-miracle-how-the-cerb-got-done/

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