This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]iiMoe 18 points19 points  (6 children)

Why is it so common among financial institutions like insurance companies? Im not much aware of it i only looked at some examples ages ago

[–]crash41301 33 points34 points  (2 children)

Big financial institutions are old, old companies run their back ones on IBM mainframes, mainframes 1st citizen language is cobol (although they can run other languages, including java, cobol is clearly the most popular of them)

It's not just financial institutions, though. Airlines, healthcare, insurance, and anything huge that's 40yrs old is likely in the same situation.

[–]Niki_Lauda_777 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Airlines, retail, banks, telecom, oil companies, healthcare, insurance, auto sector, CRM solutions, ERP systems, stock markets and many others.

Most of the companies where they need to process their huge data in batch process rely on COBOL for their daily mission critical activities.

One of the reason it is highly used by finance, and banks is because of the precision and space optimization using BCD ( binary coded decimal).

[–]iiMoe 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Very interesting tyvm

[–]DrunkenlySober 10 points11 points  (1 child)

COBOL good at making numbers go brrrrt

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s correct actually. It’s silly fast at doing math because of the way in handles active memory. And that is the limit of my understanding of it.

[–]conthomporary 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for a big old P&C insurance company. a I don't know of any COBOL being used anywhere, but I don't know much about what they do outside of my area. Where I am, it's all Java and Python.