‘hello, COBOL!’
You might have heard, the current Coronavirus pandemic unearthed critical vulnerabilities in many-a-state-government’s unemployment office. It seems, most still rely on a programming language created in the late 1950s: COBOL. COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language. It’s a language as pervasive as it is obscure; few programmers working nowadays learn it or use it in any significant way. And yet, “95% of ATM swipes, use COBOL code”, it “powers 80% of in-person transactions”, and everyday “COBOL systems handle $3 trillion in commerce.” 😳 That’s were the disparity lies. (Interesting COBOL trivia from: https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course/blob/master/COBOL%20Programming%20with%20VSCode.pdf)
So, picture it: COBOL was created before personal computers and the arrival of the almighty internet. At the point of its birth, universities and other large-scale organizations had their own computer networks, each with rules of their own, which was fine because they seldom needed to communicate with each other. COBOL was an attempt by a group of engineers, including Grace Hopper, to bridge the divides.
By the 1970s, COBOL dominated the way data was stored and corporations handled their businesses. The apparent paradox of why during this Covid-19 crisis sites like Netflix and Zoom have effectively handled a crazy influx of new business without much difficulty, but government offices were left paralyzed, is beautifully explained in the video below by The Verge. Spoiler alert: it’s all about server architecture.
I loved the following quote regarding the paradigmatic shift that needed to happen in server architecture as the internet placed greater need on flexibility and adaptability: talking about servers, the speaker says, “They’re not pets anymore: now they’re cattle.” (At minute 3:05)
Another concept brought up in the video worth mentioning is the one about “technical debt” (at around minute 5). Since migrating COBOL programs to cloud services like AWS and Microsoft Azure is impossible, they just stay where they are, getting older and older, and therefore even harder to maintain. “If you aren’t spending money on upgrades every year, it piles up fast.” And the thing is, even if there were vast amounts of money to spend on said upgrades to COBOL programs, in order to modernize them — have them join cloud-based servers and the like — in the end, it might just be simpler to start from scratch.
More about this peculiar conundrum here:
In order to learn more about COBOL, I signed up for a free course offered by IBM. After registering, I got an email with credentials and further links. I joined the Slack community for the Open Mainframe Project. I opened up my editor, VS Code, and clicked on the gear icon at the lower left corner. From the menu, I selected “Extensions”. First things first, you need two VS Code extensions: I searched for the Zowe Explorer extension and clicked install. I then had to find and install an extension called IBM Z Open Editor. There were some system requirements to check, and apparently I needed to have a Java runtime 8 installed. I installed Oracle’s JDK. Et voilà! A series of funky looking files appeared in my editor.
One last note about how to solve the problem of not having enough programmers tending to somewhat outdated code: At New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where I completed my MBA too many years ago, I had the pleasure of taking the Foundations of Finance course with Professor William L. Silber. On the first day, inside a lecture hall with 100+ students, the professor warned us he wanted each student to answer at least one question during the course of the semester. He was taking names; talk about anxiety inducing. Days passed, I noticed he had a recurring saying in class, and when my turn came to raise my hand and answer his question, I boldly answered like this: “supply and demand; it answers 99% of all questions!” And so it goes. Stay well, friends. 👋🏽
