# COBOL experts wanted!



## getopt (Apr 6, 2020)

New Jersey officials vowed Saturday to speed up the processing of unemployment claims despite relying on a 40-year-old computer system that has been overwhelmed by the record number of requests due to the coronavirus crisis.









						NJ's 40-year-old system increases delays for unemployment checks amid coronavirus crisis
					

Jobless New Jerseyans have experienced heavy lag times while trying to collect unemployment checks partly due to a "clunky" 1980s computer system.



					www.northjersey.com
				




Never change a running system.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Apr 6, 2020)

Start looking in the nursing homes  Seriously, the last guy I knew who was a COBOL maintainer was pushing 70, and that was  14 years ago. I am sure there are still people out there...


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## Phishfry (Apr 6, 2020)

NY StateConnecticut is in the same boat:








						He Needs Jobless Benefits. He Was Told to Find a Fax Machine. (Published 2020)
					

Thousands of newly unemployed New Yorkers desperate to stay afloat are being frustrated by the state’s 1970s-era technology.




					www.nytimes.com
				





> The maximum weekly benefit in New York is $504 a week, compared with $631 in Connecticut, $713 in New Jersey and $823 in Massachusetts.
> *“New York’s benefits system is unusually stingy,”*



Stingy heck check out Virginia:


> Weekly *unemployment benefits* in Virginia range from $54 to $378 per week


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## Phishfry (Apr 6, 2020)

GO NAVY








						Rear Admiral Amazing Grace Hopper taught computers English
					

She recorded the first computer bug when a moth got caught in a relay switch




					massivesci.com


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## getopt (Apr 24, 2020)

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital
					

Dust off your COBOL code and give it new life in WebAssembly




					www.theregister.co.uk
				




BTW the ports have lang/gnu-cobol
Does anyone uses it?

Using the GNUCobol project, you can compile COBOL code to C and then use Emscripten to compile the C code to WebAssembly. Cloudflare offers a tool called cobaul to simplify this process.


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## ralphbsz (Apr 24, 2020)

I played with Gnu COBOL a few years ago, for one evening. I remembered enough to write functioning 50-line programs, and they actually compiled and ran. Didn't go to the basement to pull my old COBOL books out of the basement though, so it was very superficial.

One of the problems with COBOL environments (at least for me, in the old days when I was doing it) was that COBOL programs have to be closely integrated with databases. And that integration was different in every platform (this was before relational databases and SQL). So a lot of COBOL code was completely platform-specific. Obviously, this didn't apply to pure batch processing that used only input and output files (from deck of cards to printed documents, and perhaps another deck with database updates).


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## 20-100-2fe (Apr 24, 2020)

This is not a programming language issue, but a management issue. Most companies work in project mode and a project has a beginning and an end. When a project is finished, its participants are dispatched on other projects. 
However, the outcome of a project is a new asset, but because it is immaterial, nobody cares... Until the situation reminds everyone how important this asset is.

Businesses (and organizations) are driven by short-term consideration - you can deem yourself lucky if your management has a time horizon of a quarter. Now, add to that the fact that many important decisions are biased by corruption, you'll easily understand it's a miracle that our situation is not worse!


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## weberjn (Apr 25, 2020)

ralphbsz said:


> I played with Gnu COBOL a few years ago, for one evening.



Here are some samples to get you started with https://www.freshports.org/lang/gnu-cobol










						7 cobol examples with explanations.
					

You may have heard COBOL before. If you search for it you will find images like this:




					medium.com
				




$ cobc -x VARS.CBL 
$ ./VARS


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## mark_j (Apr 26, 2020)

We have a suite of cobol applications inherited from a business that was taken over. They ran on SCO. We 'ported' them to RH Linux and they've been running ever since for about 8 years. No one wants to spend the time/money re-writing what works. Zero maintenance, zero bugs, it works, it will stay until it's no longer needed is my guess.

This happens a lot in business. It's not a bad thing.


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## 20-100-2fe (Apr 26, 2020)

Zero maintenance means zero change, neither in the nature, nor in the regulatory context of the business.
Lucky you!


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## mark_j (Apr 27, 2020)

It's so old, it's internal to the business and it works. What can I say?
(Oh, and also no one volunteers to maintain it less they get stuck with it... )


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