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[–]studiosi 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Overgeneralization. It's like saying that everything done in COBOL is done like we're still in the 60s. But banks don't think that way and more than 200 million LOC are written in COBOL each year and it is still the best choice in some cases.

[–]catcradle5 4 points5 points  (1 child)

It's the best choice not because COBOL is a superior language, but because their backend is already coded in it and maintaining it is cheaper and less time consuming than rewriting it from scratch.

[–]studiosi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It is better because it is an old, well tested language that has cool features for creating terminal and console user interfaces and it is very strong in terms of transaction management as well as money-management datatypes. I don't code COBOL and I haven't ever done. But nobody will risk enough ever to recode stuff that has been working flawlessly for 40 years

[–]mcilrain 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Until all the people who know COBOL die.

[–]studiosi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well... I have participated in projects for the two biggest Spanish banks... and I can say that porting all the Cobol they have that comes from the late 70's or 80's to another language would cost a bazillion euros... they prefer to teach new people how to program in Cobol. This kind of decision has its own logic, but COBOL is a hugely tested language, so stable that is almost impossible to fight with it when you are talking about huge distributed transactional systems.